ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

"Little Boxes All the Same" ? Or How the Doctorate became a Research Degree (France, 19th-Century)

• In Event: Building Disciplines

English Abstract

When the First French Empire re-established a system of higher education in 1806, the doctorate acquired a specific importance. From the early 1830s onwards the Doctorate of Letters (doctorat ès lettres) degree, initially designed to demonstrate classical taste, literary talent and rhetorical brilliance, increasingly relied more and more on the written word, specialised scholarship and the pursuit of originality. A similar trajectory was followed by the Doctorate of Science degree, beginning in the 1840s. While initially the doctorate, the highest academic degree, which qualifies one to join the community of peers and teach in turn, aimed to prove mastery of a set of traditional intellectual skills through a solemn ceremony mirroring the bachelor's degree, it came to certify the ability to produce new knowledge and is thus becoming the only degree to require the production of original knowledge – at least in the faculties of science and letters. This presentation will examine the reasons behind this transformation, whereby the doctoral thesis became the first piece of scientific work recognised by peers, and therefore a gateway to understanding the expectations placed on young scholars in terms of both the knowledge they produce and their integration into the professional organisation.

Author

• Pierre Verschueren, Université Marie et Louis Pasteur and Institut universitaire de France