[9] The Collège de Sorbonne was suppressed during the French Revolution, reopened by Napoleon in 1808 and finally closed in 1882.

Hastings Rashdall, in The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (1895), which is still a standard reference on the topic, lists some 70 colleges of the university from the Middle Ages alone; some of these were short-lived and disappeared already before the end of the medieval period, but others were founded during the early modern period, like the Collège des Quatre-Nations.

More than 20,000 students, teachers and other supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached.

While the crowd dispersed, some began to make barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time.

Brutal street fighting ensued between students and riot police, most notably on Rue Gay-Lussac.

Early the next morning, as the fighting disbanded, Daniel Cohn-Bendit sent out a radio broadcast calling for a general strike.

On Monday, 13 May, more than one million workers went on strike and the students declared that the Sorbonne was "open to the public".

[10] Negotiations ended, and students returned to their campuses after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover police still occupying the schools.

The amphitheatre (Le Grand Amphithéâtre) and the entire building complex (façades and roofs) became monuments in 1975.

[12][13][14] Among other changes, the activities of the universities were structured around 648 provisional "Education and Research Units" (Unités d'Enseignement et de Recherche, UER).

[15] This had significant impacts on the management and governance of each faculty, which operated with great autonomy from the central university administration.

This trend of division of the historical universities would be partially reversed after 2005 by projects encouraged by the French government, such as the PRES and the COMUE, and even more by the complete mergers achieved later (see below).

[17] Furthermore, the University of Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas), while not based in the Sorbonne building, continued to operate from the Panthéon site across the Cujas street.

[18] The common heritage and estate of the University of Paris (including the Sorbonne building) was not divided and instead placed under the authority of a common administration: the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, whose headquarters are also located in the Sorbonne building.

[20] The classrooms, libraries and administrative offices are attributed to the Universities maintaining operations in the building: Panthéon-Sorbonne, Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Sorbonne-Université (which also has its headquarters) and Paris-Cité.

[12][21] In 2018 the project effectively merged the former universities of Paris 4 and 6, taking the name "Sorbonne-Université" with or without the hyphen.