Q1. Is this program taught in English?
+No. The entire curriculum runs in French, with DELF B2 minimum required and DALF C1 strongly preferred for clinical years.
This is something that almost no other medical school in the world can say. Cardinal Conrad of Urach, who was the Pope's agent in the area, gave the school's Faculty of Medicine its first official rules on August 17, 1220. It is the oldest medical school in the world that is still open for business. There are older schools in Europe that teach theology, law, and the arts, but Montpellier is the only school in Europe that teaches medicine. In 2020 and 2021, the school celebrated its 800th anniversary. This was such a big deal that France made a national postage stamp to honor it.
The roots go back even further than 1220. As early as the 1100s, doctors were already teaching and practicing in Montpellier. As early as 1122, a doctor named André was working in the city. By 1170, a small group of working doctors had started to take the form of what would eventually become a real teaching body. In 1181, Guilhem VIII, the ruler of Montpellier, made an order that anyone could teach medicine there without a special license from the church or the crown. This city's open and unusually free policy is a big reason why it became a hub for medical education in the first place. It brought together Christian, Jewish, and Arab doctors at a time when it wasn't common for people from different religions to work together in Europe. The "Universitas medicorum" of Montpellier was created by the charter of 1220, which gave that lack of structure to the teaching scene.
The faculty has a long past full of well-known names. People often call Guy de Chauliac the "father of surgery." He came here to learn and teach. Arnaud de Villeneuve, a famous doctor and alchemist in the Middle Ages, did the same thing. The Renaissance author François Rabelais also went to Montpellier to study medicine and later taught anatomy there. Today, Nostradamus is best known for the predictions he made. He also went to this school. This is not a random piece of information. It comes from a school of thought that has been at the center of medical thought in Europe for over a thousand years. It's not just an old school.
Nowadays, the Faculty of Medicine is part of the University of Montpellier. It has a structure that is truly unique in France: it has official teaching deals with two different university hospitals, CHU Montpellier and CHU Nîmes, instead of just one. This gives its students twice as much practice experience because they will be spread out across two full hospital systems in two different cities instead of all being in one place. The CHU Montpellier is a big hospital system that is often ranked as one of the best in France. It has fourteen different medical departments and employs about 11,000 people. The site in Nîmes is close to the Carémeau Hospital, which gives the faculty a real second base about 50 kilometers away.
The structure of the medical course in Montpellier is the same as the structure used across the whole of France. This is because medical education in France is set by national law, not by each university on its own. If a student wants to get in, they can do so through PASS (Parcours d'Accès Spécifique Santé) or L.AS (License with a health-focused minor). Both programs are one year long and are the way to get into medical, dental, pharmacy or midwifery school. At this point, there is a lot of competition because France limits the number of students who can continue to full medical school each year. This rule, called the numerus clausus in the past, is now managed by admission goals set by each medical faculty locally every year. Getting through this first year doesn't promise a spot in medicine. Students are ranked by their peers, and only the best students in the medicine track move on.
Having passed this first test, the course moves onto the DFGSM stage. This lasts two and a half years and covers core medical science topics and more clinical experience. After fourth year students move into the DFASM, which are the main clinical years. This is when hospital time becomes a regular part of the week instead of just an extra thing that happens sometimes. In France, it usually takes nine years or more from the first year of PASS to become a fully qualified, specialized doctor. And it’s a much longer process than the six-year MD structure common in Croatia, Hungary and Romania. That length isn’t a Montpellier-only quirk, but rather reflects the way French medical education is structured more generally, with a greater emphasis on a long, closely watched path through hospital-based learning rather than a shorter, more rushed one.
Language is the most important thing to think about if you want to study medicine in Montpellier or anywhere else in France as a foreign student. Every part of the course is taught in French, even the clinical years and conversations with patients on the ward. There isn't a different medical track taught in English like there is at some schools in Central or Eastern Europe. Applicants from outside of France, like Indian students, are usually expected to have at least a DELF B2 level of French. By the time the clinical years start, DALF C1 is strongly desired, since patient safety relies on real, fluent communication, not just French for school. This needs to be said clearly because it is the main thing that makes this path different from the English-taught options that have been talked about in other overviews.
Most international applicants go through Campus France, which is France's official office for welcoming international students, and Parcoursup, which is the national platform for first-year PASS and L.AS admissions. Indian applicants are not given a special spot or quota, nor are applicants of any other country. Once inside the PASS or L.AS selection process, all foreign applicants compete on the same academic level as French and EU candidates. However, those applying from outside of France must follow a slightly different application process.
Cost is genuinely one of the more attractive parts of studying medicine in France, at least relative to private, English-taught programs elsewhere. French public universities charge a two-tier fee system for students from outside the EU, EEA, and Switzerland. Since 2019, the official national rate for non-EU students without an exemption sits at €2,770 a year during the license cycle, roughly the first three years, rising to €3,770 a year for the master and doctoral cycles that follow. Importantly, though, individual universities can choose to exempt students from this higher, differentiated rate, and many French institutions do so in practice, charging the same low national fee that EU students pay instead, historically in the range of €170 to €380 a year depending on cycle. Which of these two rates actually applies at Montpellier for a given intake year is not something that can be assumed in advance. It depends on the university's own current exemption policy, which can shift from year to year, so this is a detail worth confirming directly with the faculty's international office before applying, rather than assuming the higher or lower figure by default.
Living in Montpellier brings its own real advantages. It is a mid-sized southern French city, known for a large student population, a mild Mediterranean climate, and a genuinely lower cost of living than Paris or Lyon. Student housing runs through CROUS, France's national student accommodation body, alongside private rental options, and CROUS-run canteens offer meals at heavily subsidised prices, often just a few euros each. For a student prepared to commit to French-language study and the long timeline that French medicine requires, Montpellier offers a genuinely historic, well-resourced setting to do it in, one with a claim to medical history that very few other schools on the planet can match.
