Bac français 2026 : Rimbaud, Ponge et Dorion au menu des 530 000 élèves de première, l'orthographe sous surveillance

The exam subjects

More than 500,000 students in their penultimate year of lycée began the 2026 baccalaureate session on Thursday 11 June at 08:00 with the anticipated written French exam, a four-hour test carrying a coefficient of 5 for both the general and technological streams. In the general stream, candidates chose between a commentary on an extract from Louise d'Épinay's Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant (1818) and a dissertation on poetry from the 19th to the 21st century. The dissertation offered three options: a question on whether revolt is the only path to emancipation in Rimbaud's Cahier de Douai, a prompt asking whether a critic's description of Francis Ponge as a "mechanic" who seeks to "repair, articulate, make function" illuminates La rage de l'expression, and a question on Hélène Dorion's Mes forêts.

The technological stream

Candidates in the technological stream faced a commentary on a scene from Émile Augier's 1849 play Gabrielle, or a text contraction and essay on the literature of ideas from the 16th to the 18th century. Their essay questions included "Does the need to belong to a group prevent one from being free?", "Does a taste for science help us see the world differently?", and "Does travel always allow us to discover another universe?". The official reading list of 12 works spans four literary genres and includes La Boétie's Discours de la servitude volontaire, Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour, and Colette's Sido suivi des Vrilles de la vigne.

Spelling crackdown

Education minister Édouard Geffray has spent the weeks since mid-May insisting that examiners apply stricter standards to language mastery across all subjects. "If a student has a manifestly insufficient level of spelling, syntax and grammar, they cannot pass," he told a press conference. He urged candidates to reserve 10 minutes at the end of the exam for re-reading, punctuation and agreement checks, while ruling out a mechanical point-by-point marking scale.

There will be no scale, if I may say, fault by fault. We do not reason in terms of mechanical points.

A collapsing baseline

The minister's push comes against a backdrop of alarm in higher education. Alain Joyeux, president of the association of teachers in economic and social preparatory classes, described an "collapse" in spelling standards over the past three to four years. He reported that students recruited with bien and très bien bac honours are capable of making 40, 50 or even 60 spelling errors in a single paper, including basic confusions between infinitive and past participle forms. For the first time in his career, Joyeux administered a dictation to his preparatory class students to confront them with their errors.

Among the students we recruit, we only have 'good' and 'very good' honours at the bac, and these are students who are capable of making 40, 50 to 60 spelling mistakes in their paper.

What comes next

The written French exam is the first of several milestones for première students. On Friday 12 June they face a new anticipated mathematics exam (coefficient 2), and from 22 June through 3 July they will sit the individual oral French exam, also weighted at coefficient 5, according to their personal convocation.