French Baccalauréat kicks off with philosophy exam

"Should we do everything to be happy?" or "Is an artist the master of his work? are two of the questions which faced students sitting France's famous baccalauréat exam on Monday.

Baccalauréat exam at lycée Clémenceau, Nantes, 16 June 2011. Reuters/Stéphane Mahé

All French students study Philosophy in their last year of mainstream secondary school, and it is always scheduled as the first exam of all the subjects in the baccalauréat.

329,000 pupils sat down to the four-hour exam on Monday morning, with a choice of a philiosophical essay or the examination of a text by René Descartes, Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt.

There mainstream Baccalaureat is usually taken at the age of 18 and all students study a broad range of around ten subjects, including philosophy.

Among this year's philosophy questions:

• Do works of art inform our perception?
• Should one do everything to be happy?
• Is the artist master of his/her work?
• Do we live to be happy?
• Is it enough to have choice to be free?
• Why should someone try to understand himself/herself

Students could choose instead to examine a text from Karl Popper's 'Objective Knowledge', 'Rules for the direction of the mind' by René Descartes or 'The Condition of the  Modern Man', by Hannah Arendt.

This year, there was additional stress in the run-up to the exam: the French railway strike.

Although local authorities laid on special buses in some areas to ensure high school students could get to their exams, amid heavy road traffic because of the strike, not everyone will have made it on time.