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Since the nineteenth century in France, each attempt at university reform has been much more prolonged and harder than elsewhere, and has quickly run into resistances of all kinds (social, intellectual, political) that deflect the reforms from their initial goal. Another constant feature of the debate over the university in France is the recourse to foreign references to justify innovations, as though the accepted rules did not in themselves have the wherewithall for innovation or were not sufficiently flexible. Between the 1870s and the 1960s, French academics looked successively to Germany and then increasingly to America as a reference. Alternatively, in Germany, despite crisis in the university system that ran just as deep, no such references were invoked and, until the end of the 1960s, there was a general refusal to introduce foreign elements into the Germanic university tradition. This tradition had been greatly mythified, founded as it was on a retrospective reconstruction that favored certain features over others, which were blocked out or left to one side. Comparison of France and Germany clearly shows that the paths for introducing foreign university references continued to depend profoundly on national traditions. In France, whatever the period, the discourse of innovation needs the foreign reference to legitimize itself in the eyes of public opinion or the decision-makers. In Germany, the foreign example remains suspect, to be adopted only with caution when an emergency imposes an aggiornamento of tradition or threatens Germany with decline in the international arena. Then the innovations must be borrowed more to redress the degradation in progress than to break with a tradition whose prestige remains intact. Innovations always have their own reading, particular to their social horizon and their own interests, of what is or is not acceptable for the French university to borrow. Now with Europeanization, the industrialization of curricula and growing internationalization of universities under the influence of the utilitarian, free-market discourse, these apparently outdated debates can help us better to understand the issues at stake.