Francis I created the Collège Royal, later the Collège de France, to teach humanist subjects like Greek, Hebrew, and mathematics free of charge and independent of the theology-dominated Sorbonne. The institution enshrined a principle still followed today: lectures open to all, with no tuition, no degrees, and no fixed curriculum, only the free pursuit of knowledge.
In the 1520s a group of humanist scholars persuaded Francis I that the University of Paris, dominated by conservative theologians, was stifling the revival of classical learning sweeping through Renaissance Europe. The king, himself a patron of arts and letters, responded by funding royal lecturers to teach subjects the Sorbonne neglected or actively opposed, including Greek and Hebrew philology.
The new institution had no walls of its own at first; lecturers spoke wherever space could be found, and students came without paying fees or seeking degrees. What mattered was the content of the lecture itself, delivered by whoever held the chair, to whoever chose to listen. This was startlingly democratic for its time, an era when access to higher learning was tightly gatekept by ecclesiastical authority.
The Collège de France still operates on this founding logic nearly five centuries later: admission is free and open to the public, no enrollment or diploma is required, and professors are expected to present original, unpublished research each year rather than repeat a fixed syllabus. It became a home for figures ranging from later chemist Antoine Lavoisier's era through Henri Bergson to Michel Foucault, a lineage stretching directly back to a king's decision to outflank his own theologians.