This colloquium is the fifth in the series of colloquia organized as part of the " Passage des disciplines " program. Previous colloquia have examined the negative or positive receptions, at the Collège de France and beyond, of certain "founders of discursivity", Freud (2016), Darwin (2017), Einstein (2018) and Durkheim (2019). This colloquium will explore how religion has played a role in the establishment, its administration and the renewal of professorships, both in terms of the evolution of disciplines and the choice of candidates. This applies not only to chairs linked to the history of religions, taught without any religious affiliation, but also to those that gave rise to sometimes harsh debates, particularly at the time of the separation of Church and State, in various disciplines, and for scientific and/or political reasons, for example the succession of Jules Oppert, Professor of Assyrian Philology and Archaeology (1874-1905), analyzed by Dominique Charpin during the study day on the 150 years of the EPHE: Vincent Scheil obtained the majority of votes at the assembly, but was not appointed following an intervention by the Minister, as he was a Dominican.
This will provide an opportunity to observe the interventions of the tutelle in the renewal of professorships, interventions which may have accelerated the modernization of the subjects taught, and to shed light on the institutional history of the Collège in the context of higher education in the 19th and20th centuries . Our symposium will focus on the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries , after recalling the link between biblical studies and the founding of the Collège.
