Public Knowledge

For anyone who might be interested, the four lectures I gave this spring at the Collège de France, related to my new book project on the Enlightenment, are now online here. The same link will also take you to the Collège lectures given this spring by my friend and colleague Antoine Lilti in his series entitled “Au nom de l’universel: Crises et héritages,” which I can’t recommend highly enough. In fact, the same link will show you all of Antoine Lilti’s lectures since his appointment to the Collège in 2022, including the series “Un monde nouveau: Tahiti et l’Europe des Lumières,” which derive from a book that Flammarion will publish in the fall of 2025. From Lilti’s lectures this year, my favorite was the eighth, in which he discussed the author Julien Benda (1867-1956), best known for his 1927 book Le trahison des clercs.

In the ocean of video and audio available online, the Collège de France site has a very special place. One of the most admirable things about the French academic system is that it devotes some of its most prestigious positions—the Collège professorships—to public instruction. Lectures there are free and open to the public and were so long before the internet and YouTube. I remember vividly attending several of Michel Foucault’s last lectures in his series on “Le courage de la vérité” in the late winter of 1983-84. You had to arrive hours early to have a hope of finding a seat. The acoustics were bad, Foucault was ill, his arguments were difficult, and my French was still not yet entirely à la hauteur, so, in truth, I didn’t always understand all that much. It was still remarkable to see him. This spring, Antoine Lilti routinely filled every seat in a 400-person auditorium, and there was even an overflow room. Many more people access the lectures online. On principle, every lecture given at the Collège is put online.

But the lectures are not simply entertainment, or undergraduate-level instruction. For a wonderfully engaging series of podcasts on the French Revolution, the third season of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions is a great option. John Merriman’s brilliant introductory course on modern France at Yale remains a treasure, several years after Merriman’s death. But Duncan and Merriman weren’t developing original new historical arguments (at least, not in these venues). Lilti, and Collège colleagues like Patrick Boucheron manage to do so week after week while still remaining brilliantly accessible to a general public.

The Collège de France is unabashedly elitist. The small permanent faculty comes overwhelmingly from the country’s most exclusive institutions of higher education such as the École Normale Supérieure. In our current populist moment, Patrick Boucheron in particular has become a favorite target of the French right, which routinely denounces him for trying to undermine what the French call the “roman national”—a worshipfully patriotic account of the country’s history. But a dose of elitism can be very much a good thing amidst the overwhelming chaotic whirl of the internet, in which absurd, error-filled accounts of history can become frighteningly popular (for example, the podcast of wacky pseudo-historian and alleged Holocaust-denier Darryl Cooper, who has been promoted by Tucker Carlson). At least for the lectures given by the permanent faculty (if not the sketchier talks delivered by yours truly) the Collège de France imprimatur is about the best guarantee of reputable scholarship on the planet.

Yes, of course, it is all in the French language. But my guess is that within a couple of years, the videos will come with perfectly acceptable AI-generated English-language subtitles. Even then, much of the intellectual context will remain distinctly French. Antoine Lilti’s twin lecture series on “universalism,” for instance, were prompted in large part by the current importance of “republican universalism” and “Enlightenment universalism” as political concepts in France, especially in relation to the alleged threats of ‘communitarianism” and “la politique identitaire.” For listeners unaware of this trend, the stakes of Lilti’s lectures will not be as clear as they have been to his French audience, although the intellectual content will still be rich and rewarding.

The United States, of course, with an academic system formally far less hierarchical than France’s, does not have any real equivalent of the Collège. Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholar Program does an admirable job of sending high-profile scholars to lecture in a range of colleges and universities around the country—but it is aimed at undergraduates, not the general public. Ten years ago, the National Endowment for the Humanities created the Public Scholars Program which had as its stated goal “to encourage academic writers in the humanities to communicate the significance of their research to the broadest possible range of readers.” It has since sponsored an impressive range of work.

But this spring the Trump administration canceled virtually all the current Public Scholar grants, peremptorily informing the beneficiaries that their research did not advance the president’s agenda. The program’s current web page states that the 2026 competition “will only accept projects that promote a deeper understanding of our nation’s extraordinary heritage, including our record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” But since Trump wants to abolish the NEH altogether, I wouldn’t count on anyone actually receiving a 2026 award, no matter how Trump-worshipful the proposal.

I shudder to think of the pressures a far-right French government might put on the Collège de France. Still, the institution has survived multiple bouts of revolution, civil war, and foreign occupation, and in 2030 will celebrate its five-hundredth anniversary. It is far better positioned to survive political turmoil than the NEH is, alas, to survive Donald Trump.