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abstract: LAURENCE BROCKLISS The
moment of no return: the University of Paris and the death of Aristotle
In an article published in 1981 and in my 1987 book on French higher education, I argued that the 1690s was the critical decade in the dethronement of Aristotelian physics in the French university world. On both occasions, I was primarily interested in charting for the first time the transition across the period 1650 to 1750 from an Aristotelian to a Cartesian to a Newtonian physics and made little attempt to contextualize the moments of change. This paper gives me the opportunity to revisit the rupture of the 1690s and to offer some sort of explanation as to why Aristotle was finally and so quickly dethroned. The paper will look first at the internal history of the University of Paris during this decade and relate the change to the fillip to educational innovation given by the opening of a new and well-endowed college de plein exercice – the College de Mazarin. It will then locate the transition more widely in the context of the growing importance of Paris as a cultural counterweight to the official culture of Versailles, the destabilizing effects of the Jansenist controversy on church-state relations, and the restructuring of the hitherto philosophically neutral Academie des Sciences. It will end by emphasizing the importance of the adoption of Cartesian physics by the Paris professoriate for the wider triumph of Cartesianism throughout the rest of the colleges of France. 
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