Philosophy opens the general and technological baccalaureate exams each year. A few days before the exam, we interviewed a teacher to find out what themes could fall this year.
The written baccalaureate philosophy test will take place this year on Monday June 15, 2026. Students are therefore currently revising for this exam, the grade for which is important, since a coefficient of 8 is applied to it. Candidates will have the choice between two essay statements, with a question, and a third statement which will be a text to analyze and explain. But what concepts will be covered? The topics are obviously kept secret until the test has started, so it is not possible to determine with certainty which themes will be covered.
However, we interviewed a philosophy professor to find out whether some were more likely to be put on the exam than others. Caroline Giraud, aka @caro.philomaths on TikTok, explains to us that before the last session of the baccalaureate, the concepts were grouped into five main themes, and the subjects fell on three of them. “With the reform of the baccalaureate, they removed the major themes, but in fact we still notice that in the subjects which fall, overall there is a scientific subject, a political subject and a cultural subject. And there would be a final existential theme, with notions like consciousness and happiness. PFor the moment, what we are observing, at least since 2020, is that we have had a subject on each each time”she tells us.
Each theme brings together several concepts. For example, in the political theme, we find those of State, justice and freedom. “We have the impression that justice has fallen every year for a while. But it’s difficult to do a political subject where there isn’t a little justice in it. So, inevitably, it falls. State justice is really the main bloc” of this theme, this philosophy teacher tells us. She adds that the notion of freedom is “fairly transversal” : “We can have a subject on freedom which will in fact be a scientific subject or a political subject”. Concerning scientific subjects, “even if the truth is not explicitly in the subject, it is not really possible to make a subject about science which does not at the same time talk about the truth”. Regarding cross-cutting subjects, Caroline Giraud tells us that “two notions that appear on many subjects, even when it is not explicit, are truth and duty”.
Obviously, it is better not to risk making predictions about the concepts that will fall in order to lighten your revisions. Caroline Giraud encourages students to review the entire program: “I think it’s a really bad idea to revise by concept, since there is no subject that is really on a single concept”. She gives us the example of one of the subjects of the philosophy test which fell on June 8, 2026 for students taking the baccalaureate in Asia, namely “Are we prisoners of language?”. “There is only language which appears explicitly in the subject. Except that as there is ‘prisoner’, inevitably, there will be freedom somewhere. The expression ‘prisoner of language’ draws a little on the unconscious too. Even if it is not written, all these notions are implied in the subject. And the good copies, often, are those which manage to make the link between all the notions which are in (the statement)”implicitly or explicitly.
