The French were grappling with two questions this week.
Not whether President 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 their rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to discuss their own responses to the questions on the radio and television and in newspapers.
“For me, the philosophy exam says everything about who we are,” said Édouard Geffray, France’s education minister. He was speaking from the yard of a high school he visited on Monday to crack open exam packages in front of television cameras and pass them out to students, and also to offer some last-minute nonphilosophical advice about proofreading.
The exam, he said, “actually says that we are a country in which 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 re-established a democratic government after years of being ruled by an emperor. The new government worked to root out the Roman Catholic Church from schools, Mr. 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 programs, 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, paraphrasing a passage from Hugo’s novella, “Claude Gueux.”
At his institution, the country’s top students are paid to study to become professors, scientists and, yes, philosophers. Alumni include Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
As a reflection of how important philosophy remains in France, Mr. Worms is one of many French philosophers who moonlight as radio hosts. Every week, he poses and answers three philosophical questions on air.
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 — on justice, on freedom, on what is a state, on democracy — to become a good citizen,” said Ms. Moreau, who is regularly hired by companies to lead seminars with their staff on topics like ethical investments and worker engagement through a philosophical lens.
So what’s a typical French philosophy class like? I visited Nicolas Franck’s class in a public high school in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy Parisian suburb, to find out.
Mr. Franck is the former president of the French philosophy teachers’ union and has taught the subject 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.
“If it’s just to make a living, why do people earn more than they need?” he asked, reacting to one response. “There has to be something else at play.”
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, Mr. Franck and his students explored different views about work, from the 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 at the same time.
He told the students that their “convictions and biases” formed his raw material and that by teaching them, he was “transforming” them. “That’s the work I’m doing now,” he said.
One of Mr. Franck’s students, Raphaël Bakouch, said his teacher was succeeding. The class, he said, had “completely changed how I perceive the world.” Things he took as self-evident had become much more complicated. He said he was hounded by the question of “who am I?”
“My parents named me, and I inherited my family name,” Mr. Bakouch, 17, said. “Ultimately, the only thing that truly represents us and forms our true identity is our work — what we do, what we create.” He said he loved how the concepts all overlapped.
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 day of the exam, many around the country reminisced — often ruefully — about their own experience.
“For me, it was an incredible revelation,” Mr. Geffray, the education minister, said. His press secretary mumbled that he had been “hopeless” in the class and graduated with just an eight. The police officer outside said she had also failed the exam, which is why she went into policing.
“The grade is taken very personally,” Mr. Worms said. “It evaluates you for thinking about life’s deepest questions.” When he tells cabdrivers his profession, they invariably share what mark they got in the class, he said.
“If you are not able to explain the meaning of life, who are you?”
