Academic freedom in France: From a sacred right to a s state-managed privilege Palestine as proof

This essay examines the reconfiguration of academic freedom in France through the analytical lens of authoritarian neoliberalism, arguing that what was once a constitutionally enshrined right has been transformed into a state-managed privilege distributed hierarchically according to a distinctively French framework that operates through, rather than against, the state. French authoritarian neoliberalism in higher education operates along three interlocking axes: economic restructuring; reinforced state tutelage, paradoxically presented as autonomy; and the ideological policing of legitimate knowledge rooted in colonial legacies. First, since the 1990s, structural reforms have eroded collegial governance, tied funding to performance metrics, and entrenched job precarity, consolidating state influence over research agendas and marginalizing critical domains including race, gender, and postcolonial studies. Second, reinforced state tutelage provides the organizational mechanisms that constrain scholarly enquiry while enabling political interference ideologically legitimized through Republican universalism. Third, Republican universalism is deployed to foreclose race and colonial history as valid analytical frameworks, thereby naturalizing epistemic exclusion as a defense of neutrality. Palestine emerges as the site where these dynamics converge most acutely: the criminalization of pro-Palestinian expression after 7 October 2023 reveals how the boundaries of legitimate speech are drawn precisely where critical knowledge becomes most threatening to the hegemonic order and to France’s own colonial legacies. It concludes by calling for a radical reimagining of academic freedom, not as a liberal ideal to be defended, but as a site of epistemic resistance against the exclusionary, imperialist, and authoritarian structures that academic institutions actively reproduce.