While browsing X a few days ago, I reposted without much thought a publication on the 2026 subject of the French history teaching certification exam (agrégation), which read: “Working in ancient Greece according to gender and status.”
Having myself taken this notoriously demanding exam, which straddles teaching and research, just twenty years ago, I was surprised by the wording, which would have been simply unthinkable twenty years earlier, and saddened by the anachronism of picking a fight with poor Ancient Greece using outrageously contemporary concepts borrowed from gender studies. Which is what I said. As soon as the unfortunate little message of less than 140 characters was thrown into the virtual Mordor that is Elon Musk’s network, a rain of locusts fell on my head.
I will spare you the inventory of charming words with which I was graced in a matter of moments: old bag—which is quite ironic for someone who is barely forty—idiot, reactionary, bloody aristocrat—and so on and so forth.
Here are a few lines summarising the arguments levelled against me:
I am twenty or forty years behind the times because the concept of gender has been around since the 1950s; I don’t understand anything about research; I deny that there are any differences between men and women that are worth dwelling on (which is ironic for anyone who knows me a little); I am disregarding the contribution of carbon-14 dating to historical research; history evolves, and we can use tools that do not correspond to the chosen period to study it.
I was accused of looking for problems where there were none. I was accused of wanting to make students write in ancient Greek on papyrus to make it more authentic. Stupidity competed with bad faith.
On X, as is typical of this medium, complete idiots rub shoulders with genuine academics (with some overlap between the two categories). So I wasted my time responding patiently and courteously—I want to live up to my reputation as a reactionary—to both groups, in order to cover most of the spectrum of arguments put forward against me. After that, I turned off my notifications: there is life outside social media.
But the scale of the hatred unleashed by this unfortunate exam question deserved to be addressed in another form.
Yes, I am saddened and go so far as to describe as “frightening” the wording proposed to the students of 2026 competing in the noble exercise that is the history agrégation.
Yes, I compare it to what was done twenty years ago, and I admit to “fuelling the declinist discourse”—as a prominent mediaeval history professor on the web reproaches me.
Let’s take a closer look. The agrégation exam is designed to select the best teachers for secondary schools. It is a mark of excellence that also counts towards obtaining a position at university. Each year, students who wish to take the exam must prepare questions from the syllabus covering four periods: ancient, mediaeval, modern, and contemporary history. The questions are always chosen to be very broad, encouraging students to explore a subject in depth and demonstrate a high level of synthesis in their mastery of the subject matter. However, in recent years, we have seen a worrying trend—dare I say it, a decline, for which I am often criticised: the titles of the questions on the syllabus are becoming increasingly specific and reflect, albeit still quite subtly, increasingly ideological concerns. Political and diplomatic history is increasingly giving way to social history—which is itself soon to be contaminated by other disciplines, such as gender studies.
My detractors have criticised me for being closed to any historiographical developments: by criticising the use of the word ‘gender’ in the title of the question set for students, I am said to be closing myself off to a fundamental historiographical movement, which some trace back to the 1950s and others even to the 19th century. For others, my rejection of the word would mark my narrow-mindedness and my refusal to take an interest in anything related to sex differentiation in antiquity, a reality that obviously existed long before the word ‘gender’ appeared in universities. Finally, others, sometimes the same people, refute the idea of anachronism, arguing that it is legitimate to use a concept coined after a given historical period to talk about that historical period.
There is a great deal of mental confusion in all these arguments. What I am criticising is obviously not the fact that we are interested in how men and women lived in the Peloponnese in the 7th century BC. Sorry, before our era. Nor even that we use a concept—gender—that postdates the period under study. The very word ‘work’ did not exist as such in ancient Greece, and yet it is legitimately used in historical analysis today. What I am criticising is the use of a word that is anything but neutral and is clearly, today, strongly ideologically charged—which is not adequate for a teaching exam, and which is obviously not the case for the word ‘work.’
Not so long ago, the magic words were ‘class struggle’ and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ We have moved on from the era of all-Marxism in universities, but the Left has found new obsessions. Today, it seems obvious that a subject with the terms ‘class’ or ‘class struggle’ in its title would be perceived as ideological and unscientific. Yet not so long ago, the concept of ‘class’ would have been touted as an objective analytical framework—as the word ‘gender’ is today.
The word ‘gender’ can mean two things. For those who promote the term, it refers to ‘the social role with which one identifies’ in a self-predictive manner.
Under these circumstances, and insofar as this concept is based on self-designation and was constructed in opposition to the famous forced ‘assignment’ of gender at birth, asking people to discuss the gender of the ancient Greeks makes no sense, since this concept was unknown to them and they therefore could not ‘identify with a gender.’
Another possibility is that ‘gender’ is simply a synonym for ‘sex,’ as in French grammar, where we speak of ‘masculine gender’ and ‘feminine gender.’ In this case, the subject could have been formulated as follows: “Working in ancient Greece according to sex, status, and condition.” It is no coincidence that many of my opponents feel compelled to rephrase the subject to show its innocuousness: it is ‘only’ a matter of discussing the differences between men and women in relation to work in Ancient Greece. I agree: why not simply put it in those terms?
It is true that there is a specific—almost emotional—charge attached to the use of the word ‘gender.’
Logically, either we accept the primary meaning of the word ‘gender,’ in which case it is dishonest to deny the ideological assumptions behind the term, which is conceived as a deconstruction of a dominant and oppressive model, that of sexual binary. We must therefore assume that there is an anachronism, or rather, a desire to apply a contemporary militant reality of recent manufacture—20, 40, or 50 years old, it doesn’t matter—to a past reality. Either we give the word ‘gender’ its second meaning, and it is therefore just as dishonest to criticise me on the grounds that I deny the epistemological contribution of gender studies to the discipline of history, which developed on the basis of the first meaning of the word, or that I have not read a decisive thesis by an American historian of the 1970s on patriarchal oppression in Delphi among pottery craftsmen/craftswomen in 497 (BCE).
The packs of orcs unleashed across the plains of X to hunt down nasty reactionaries like me navigate from one definition of the word ‘gender’ to the other with the utmost ease, without worrying about the contradiction.
As one of my supporters on X humorously pointed out in this crazy controversy, “Based on the responses to this comment, there would be a tremendous sociological study to be done on the theme of ‘Pretending not to understand when you belong to the academic left.’”
For it is obvious that many of the commentators who have attacked my post know very well what they are talking about and are playing innocent in the name of a scientific ideal that is as unreal as butter on a spit: a linear progression of knowledge towards ever greater intellectual enlightenment, where each era enriches the debate with new concepts that are perfectly pure in intention, allowing for increasingly ‘refined, problematised, and critical’ analyses of human experience.
If only.
But I do not believe in the myth of pure objectivity in history. Biases are unavoidable, but we must admit them and not sugarcoat them with honeyed words about intellectual objectivity or scientific rigour. The rather successful takeover of the university by left-wing thinkers has established that the standard of truth and objectivity is measured by the speaker’s acquiescence to their progressive theories. Consequently, any discourse that deviates from this is not judged as refutable or debatable by argument but as evading ex ante the framework of scientific discussion and objectivity.
Under these conditions, aspiring teachers who have any doubts about the relevance of gender theory are invited to resort to the doublethink so dear to Orwell: for the moment, it is the only weapon they have if they want to make their way in the French national education system.