Earlier this month, the students were grappling with two questions. Not whether President Donald Trump would hurl insults and leave the Group of 7 early or who the least-known player in the World Cup is. Instead, they were asking: can one be happy when others are not? And, do we have control of our words? The questions were part of this year’s written test in philosophy, taken at the exact same time each year around the country by more than a half-million 17 and 18-year-olds. The students, who have spent all year taking a required course in philosophy, have to answer one of two questions, or dissect a philosophical tract. This year, the tract came from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 book Human, All Too Human.
Students have four hours to write their responses. The exam is such an important part of French education that local news outlets commit live-blogs to it, beside rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to discuss their own responses to the questions. “For me, the philosophy exam says everything about who we are,” said Édouard Geffray, France’s education minister. The exam, he said, “actually says that we have chosen to put the examination of opposing views and debate at the heart of education.”
Napoleon introduced the subject of philosophy to high schools in 1809, originally to train administrators, explained Bruno Poucet, an expert on the history of education in France and a professor emeritus at the University of Picardy Jules Verne in Amiens.
But in the 1880s, the course took on a different purpose as the country reestablished a democratic government, Poucet said. “The Republic was breaking free, so it was going to rely on the Enlightenment to emancipate itself, intellectually and politically, from the weight of the Catholic Church,” he said.
All students take the course in their final year of high school, except for those in vocational programmes, who train for jobs in areas like construction or hotel management. “Victor Hugo said, ‘Instead of cutting off the heads, just fill them up’,” said Frédéric Worms, a philosopher and the head of the country’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure.
At his institution, the country’s top students are paid to study to become professors, scientists and philosophers. Worms is one of many French philosophers who moonlight as radio hosts. Every week, he poses and answers three philosophical questions.
Anne-Sophie Moreau, an editor of Philosophie Magazine, said the philosophy course and exam were a rite of passage for the French, similar to military service in other countries. “It’s the idea that you have to go through this collective reflection on values to become a good citizen,” said Moreau.
So what’s a typical French philosophy class like? I visited Nicolas Franck’s class in a public high school in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Franck is the former president of the French philosophy teachers’ union and has taught for 35 years. The day I visited, his students grappled with the question “Why do we work?” He sat on a desk at the front and went through the responses that students had offered.
Work is one of 17 interwoven concepts that are the pillars of the course’s curriculum. Others include freedom, justice, truth, language and happiness. Teachers can design their courses as they see fit, dipping into a huge list of philosophers along the way.
Later, he explained that the point of the course was not just to learn historical philosophical theories. “What counts most,” he said, “is an individual’s capacity to understand and grasp ideas.”
Over two hours, Franck and his students explored different views about work, from 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s view that it formed a distraction from contemplating our own mortality, to Karl Marx’s theory that through work, humans transform raw materials and their inner selves.
He told the students that their “convictions and biases” formed his raw material and that by teaching them, he was “transforming” them. The philosophy course is widely considered the most difficult of a student’s final year. The average grade in 2025 was 10.8 out of 20, 2.3 points below the general grade-point average. “The grade is taken very personally,” Worms said. “It evaluates you for thinking about life’s deepest questions.”
New York Times News Service