From Reason to Ideology: How the Collège de France Lost Twenty Years of Progress
By Céline Masson
On the cancelling of the symposium, “The Child, Target of Ideologies”
In 2005, the Collège de France devoted two days to a symposium entitled “Belief, Reason, and Unreason.” The following year, they published a book containing the lecture texts. In his introductory remarks, one of the symposium’s organisers, the historian Gérard Fussman, the coordinator of the eponymous book, wrote: “ Scientific discoveries can be challenged in the name of ancestral beliefs all the more easily because, very often, they contradict hypotheses previously considered certain by scientists in the same field. The Copernican theory, Pasteur’s practices, and Darwinism provoked opposition from the scientists of the time. (…) In many cases, the clash between ancient beliefs, scientific discoveries, and the rational practices stemming from these discoveries is a war whose invisible victims number in the hundreds of thousands or millions (…) .”
He reiterates an obvious point that the Collège de France then seemed to consider indisputable: that a scientific discovery almost always clashes with established beliefs, that this clash can be violent—from Galileo to Lysenko—and that scientists have societal debates at their disposal to resolve it, since “ it clashes, by definition, with received opinions or, to put it another way, with commonly accepted beliefs .” Bringing together researchers from different disciplines to present their research results to a wide audience is the mission of our esteemed academic institutions.
A Conference Cancelled
Public health has not been spared by beliefs, and when the passion for belief prevails, facts no longer penetrate critical thinking. We demonstrated this in our book, *The Sermon of Hippocrates* (L’Observatoire, 2025). Twenty years after this symposium at the Collège de France, history seems to have taken a singularly ironic turn: “The Child, Target of Ideologies,” a symposium we organised and planned to hold there, was ultimately cancelled by the institution under public pressure. While the Collège de France was certainly not the organiser, it had agreed to host the event before reneging on its commitment.
In its response, the Collège de France invoked its principles of neutrality: “ After careful examination of the program and the conditions under which this event is presented, it appears that certain elements are not fully compatible with the principles of neutrality that apply to the Collège de France in the context of its activities.” It is difficult not to see in this episode a practical illustration of the ideological pressures that the colloquium was precisely intended to examine.
The institution that once championed the necessity of debate between reason and belief, and lamented the scarcity of such debate, found itself caught out when it came to hosting a symposium dedicated to the effects of ideologies and beliefs on education, health, and the psychological development of children. While the multidisciplinary presentations ultimately could not be held at the Collège de France, the symposium itself will, fortunately, take place at the Palais du Luxembourg on October 16, 2026. And the interest it is generating remains strong: several weeks before it begins, it is already fully booked. I wonder what the late historian Gérard Fussman, then a professor at the Collège de France, would have thought of it.
Lysenkoism
This textbook case shows that supposedly neutral “principles” are, in reality, steeped in ideology, and that invoking a virtue is enough to silence debate or, worse still, generate a doctrine when contradiction is impossible. In one of the articles in this comprehensive work on reason and unreason, the palaeontologist and biologist Armand de Ricqlès revisits the Lysenko “affair,” which masterfully illustrates how an ideological doctrine (disguised as science) can impose itself as a scientific “truth” within institutions or within a party, and ultimately produce such aberrations.
The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), supported by Stalin, directed Soviet biology for about twenty years. Lysenkoism rejected classical genetics (known as “Mendel-Morganian”) in favour of Lamarckian-type heredity – the transmission of acquired characteristics – a current that its proponents paradoxically described as “active Soviet Darwinism”.
Exported to France in 1948, Lysenkoism became, writes Armand de Ricqlès, a true article of faith for the French Communist Party, which placed French communist biologists in a delicate position, first and foremost Professor Marcel Prenant, the author’s first boss: a resistance fighter, former head of the FTP (Francs-tireurs et partisans), deportee, and member of the PCF Central Committee after the war.
Compromise with ideology
The article indicates that more recent research, notably that of historian Kirill Rossianov (1993), has gone further by establishing, through archival research, Stalin’s personal and direct involvement: he himself annotated and corrected Lysenko’s 1948 report, erasing references to a “relative” or “bourgeois” science in favour of Lamarckism presented as objective scientific truth. Political power thus intervened far more directly than previously thought on the scientific content itself. The author emphasises that trust, passion, and fervour toward the USSR—belief—blinded the French Lysenkoists to such an extent that one communist physicist had to admit: “ We have been deceived.”
Thus, by compromising themselves with ideology and power, some scientists have sacrificed twenty years of scientific progress, at the cost of unjust death or mistreatment inflicted upon scholars recognised for the value of their work. What epistemological boundaries must we establish to prevent beliefs from distorting words, ideas, and science—while preserving, even within science, everyone’s capacity to create?
Today, we are caught between two pitfalls: on one side, scientism, that is, total objectivism; on the other, identity-based and reactionary sociologism. How then can we distinguish what belongs to science from what does not? To do so, we must find a third way—a non-dogmatic, creative rationality—that allows us to continue thinking, debating, and creating. This is an urgent matter, for the university as well as for democracy.
Céline Masson is a psychoanalyst and full professor of psychology, as well as co-director of L’Observatoire la Petite Sirène, which raises awareness about transidentification in minors
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