Victor Hugo, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, but also Zola... This Thursday afternoon it is the turn of the high school students at the end of the first year to take their anticipated test of the French baccalaureate: from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Extreme conditions, with high heat expected throughout France, students will have to stay well hydrated to keep a cool head.
Here are the subjects proposed for the bachelor of the general stream.
This year on the menu of the French baccalaureate: The novel and the story from the Middle Ages to the 21st century and poetry from the 19th century to the 21st century for the general sector.
Subject of the French baccalaureate - general stream
You will choose one of the following two subjects:
1- Comment (20 points)
Object of study: The novel and the narrative from the Middle Ages to the 21st century
You will comment on the following text:
Sylvie GERMAIN (born in 1954), Days of anger, Songs, "The brothers", 1989
Set in an indeterminate past, Sylvie Germain's novel Jours de anger takes place in the forests of the Morvan.
The following text is taken from a chapter entitled “The Brethren”.
It presents the nine sons of Ephraïm Mauperthuis and Reinette-la-Grasse.
They were forest people.
And the forests had made them in their image.
To their power, their loneliness, their harshness.
Hardness drawn from that of their common ground, this granite base of a tender pink millions of centuries old, rustling with springs, pierced by ponds, protruding everywhere from between grasses, ferns and brambles.
The same song inhabited them, men and trees.
A song that has always been confronted with silence, with rock.
A song without melody.
A brutal song, clashing like the seasons, - crushing summers of heat, long winters petrified under the snow.
A song made of cries, clamours, resonances and stridency.
A song that chanted as much their joys as their anger.
For everything in them took on accents of anger, even love.
They had been brought up more among trees than among men, they had fed themselves since childhood on fruits, vegetables and wild berries which grow in the undergrowth and on the flesh of animals which lodge in the forests;
they knew all the paths traced in the sky by the stars and all the paths that wind between the trees, the brambles and the copses and in whose shadow the foxes, the wild cats and the deer slip, and the alleys boars.
Alleys traced at ground level between grass and thorns parallel to the Milky Way, as if mirroring.
As an echo also to the road that led pilgrims from Vézelay to Santiago de Compostela.
The house where they were born had very quickly proved to be much too small to be able to shelter them all, and too poor above all to be able to feed them.
They were the sons of Ephraim Mauperthuis and Reinette-la-Grasse.
1 Venelles: small paths.
2 Secular: which have existed for a hundred years or more.
2- Essay (20 points)
Object of study: Poetry from the 19th century to the 21st century
The candidate deals with the choice, taking into account the work and the course studied during the year, one of the following three subjects:
Subject to
Work: Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, books I to IV
Journey: the memories of a soul.
Are books I to IV of the Contemplations only an intimate song?
You will answer this question in an organized development based on books 1 to 4 of the Contemplations, on the texts you have studied as part of the associated course, and on your personal culture.
Subject B
Work: Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Course: poetic alchemy: mud and gold.
In Romantic Art (“Théophile Gautier”, 1869), Baudelaire wrote: “It is one of the prodigious privileges of Art that the horrible, artistically expressed, becomes beauty […]”.
Does this statement reflect your reading of Les Fleurs du Mal?
You will answer this question in an organized development based on Les Fleurs du Mal, on the texts you have studied as part of the associated course, and on your personal culture.
Subject C
Work: Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcohols
Journey: poetic modernity?
Is Apollinaire's poetry a celebration of modernity?
You will answer this question in an organized development based on Alcohols, on the texts you have studied as part of the associated course, and on your personal culture.
The official subject in PDF format here
Subject of the French baccalaureate - techno series
You will choose one of the following two subjects:
1- Text commentary (20 points)
Object of study: The novel and the story from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.
Text by Émile Zola, Germinal, 1885.
Horses were used in the mines in the 19th century, which were lowered to the bottom of the shafts to help transport the coal.
In this excerpt, Zola presents two of these animals which, unlike humans, stayed underground for years, without coming back up.
(..)
You will make the literary commentary of this text using the following leads:
- Horses: two moving characters.
- A gradual descent into hell.
2- Text contraction (10 points) and essay (10 points)
Object of study: The literature of ideas from the 16th to the 18th century.
Taking into account the work and the course studied during the year, you will deal with one of the following three subjects:
A- Rabelais, Gargantua, chapters XI to XXIV.
Course: the right education.
Text by Jacqueline de Romilly, Writings on Education, 1984.
B- La Bruyère, The Characters, book XI “Of Man”.
Course: painting men, examining human nature.
Text after Henri Amer, “Literature and portraiture, Retz, Saint-Simon, Chateaubriand, Proust”, review Études françaises, May 1967.
C- Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens.
Course: write and fight for equality.
Text by Martine Reid, "George Sand: the fight of a feminist novelist", magazine Texts and documents for the class, September 15, 2014.
Full official story here:
See also
Bac results
French baccalaureate: the oral - guide and method
French baccalaureate: the oral - advice from a teacher to pass the oral, pitfalls to avoid...
French baccalaureate: writing - guide and method for passing the 4-hour exam
