Guest Speakers
Scholars, writers and public figures who have taught at Academia Tocqueville.
Joel Alicea
Joel Alicea is an Associate Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law and the Co-Director of the Law School’s Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. He previously served as a law clerk for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., on the United States Supreme Court. Professor Alicea’s scholarship focuses on constitutional theory and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the Notre Dame Law Review, as well as City Journal and National Affairs.
Thibault Barbieux
Thibault Barbieux is Associate Professor (maître de conférences) of Legal History at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), where he is a member of the DANTE research centre. A legal historian, he researches the history of public law, especially sovereignty and local liberties in the French Old Regime, as well as the history of political ideas and legal thought. He holds a Master’s degree in legal history from Université Paris Panthéon-Assas and a PhD from Université Clermont Auvergne (2021). His thesis, published as Contractualisme provincial et souveraineté monarchique dans la France d’Ancien Régime (LGDJ, 2022), was awarded the Prix Joinet by the Institut Francophone pour la Justice et la Démocratie and received the first mention (ex aequo) of the 2023 thesis prize of the Association des historiens des facultés de droit.
François-Xavier Bellamy
François-Xavier Bellamy is a philosopher and politician. He is a former Deputy Mayor of Versailles (2008–2019) and is now a Member of the European Parliament (2019–present), having led the The Republicans list in the 2019 election and the 2024 election. After two-years preparatory classes (A/L) in the Lycée Henri-IV, he got into the École normale supérieure, from which he graduated in 2005. He earned the agrégation in philosophy in 2008. Bellamy is the author of four books. He won the Prix d’Aumale from the Académie Française in 2014 for his first book, Les déshérités ou l’urgence de transmettre. In this essay, he analyses the failure of the French educational system as the result of an ideology that refuses the transmission of culture, thus creating disinherited students. In 2018, he published an essay entitled Demeure on the fascination with movement that he believes characterizes the modern era, and in which he sees the cause of the crisis of meaning affecting the West.
P. Bracy Bersnak
P. Bracy Bersnak is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science & Economics at Christendom College. He holds an M.A. in modern European history and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political theory from the Catholic University of America. His research focuses on philosophical conservatism and Catholic social thought. His writings have appeared in The Catholic Social Science Review, Perspectives on Political Science, The Journal of Catholic Social Thought, and The American Spectator. He lives in Front Royal, Virginia with his two daughters.
Roger Boada Queralt
Roger Boada Queralt is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Barcelona. He studied law at ESADE (Universitat Ramon Llull), where he later earned his PhD and taught constitutional law, and holds an LL.M. from Duke University. His research focuses on constitutional theory and on the limits of state power in the School of Salamanca. His book Los límites del poder del Estado en el pensamiento de Francisco de Vitoria y Francisco Suárez was published by the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales in 2024. He has also taught comparative constitutional law and the history of constitutionalism at Georgetown Law’s Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London.
Arnaud Bouthéon
Arnaud Bouthéon is the cofounder of Sens Commun (a conservative political movement) and Congrès Mission (an annual showcase for the vitality of Christian culture and thought in France, aiming at being a laboratory to help Christians dialogue with the world). A Catholic layman, he is the founder and president of the French chapter of the Knights of Columbus. He wrote Comme un athlète de Dieu. Manifeste sportif et chrétien (Salvator, 2017)
Rémi Brague
Rémi Brague is a philosopher and historian of philosophy, and a writer. He is an Emeritus Professor at La Sorbonne Université. After having studied mediaeval philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, he focused on Christianity and intellectual history, comparing the evolution of the three monotheistic religions. He is Officer of the Légion d’honneur and member of the Institut de France, and has received multiple awards for his writings.
François-Henri Briard
François-Henri Briard is a lawyer and barrister at the Conseil d’Etat and Cour de cassation. He studied at Panthéon-Assas Université and is a long-standing supporter of French-American friendship. He has been administrator of the Sarah Lawrence University, NY, and is member of the Historical Society of the Supreme Court as well as an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati. He serves in the French military as a member of the Naval Reserve.
Alexis Carré
Alexis Carré is Assistant Professor at the School of Civic Leadership of the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in philosophy from the École normale supérieure in 2021; his dissertation on war, law and the refounding of liberalism in Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron was awarded the Prix Raymond Aron for research. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton’s James Madison Program and Harvard’s Program on Constitutional Government, and taught political theory at Sciences Po. His research focuses on the political and moral conditions that allow liberal democracies to defend themselves. He contributes regularly to Le Figaro, Commentaire and Quillette.
Greg Conti
Greg Conti is assistant professor of Politics at Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France, and on the lessons that can be drawn from that history for contemporary debates in political philosophy. His book Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain was released by Cambridge University Press in 2019 (paperback, 2020). He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Harvard University. He has also been a fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge.
Marie Kawthar Daouda
Marie Kawthar Daouda is a Lecturer in French Language and Literature at Oriel College, Oxford. Her research focuses on the representations of good and evil and the echoes of the late-antiquity in contemporary France and Great Britain, as well as on the connections between politics, religion, and literature in France from the French Revolution to the mid-20th century.
Patrice Gueniffey
Patrice Gueniffey is a French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. A disciple of François Furet, with whom he collaborated on the Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988), he received his doctorate in 1989 with a thesis on elections during the Revolution, published as Le Nombre et la Raison. La Révolution française et les élections (1993). He became directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 2001 and directed its Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron from 2006 to 2008. His books include La Politique de la Terreur. Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789-1794 (2000), Le Dix-huit Brumaire. L’épilogue de la Révolution française (2008), Histoires de la Révolution et de l’Empire (2011) and Napoléon et de Gaulle. Deux héros français (2017), which won the Prix Montaigne. His Bonaparte (1769-1802) (2013), awarded the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon and the Grand prix de la biographie politique, was published in English by Harvard University Press in 2015. In 2014 he received the Grand prix Gobert of the Académie française.
Peter Hicks
Peter Hicks is one of the world’s experts on Napoleon and is the manager of relations with academic institutions, museums and associations outside France at the Foundation Napoleon. He is a lecturer in English and History at the Institut Catholique des Etudes Supérieures at La-Roche sur-Yon in the Vendée region. A renowned and prize-winning musician, he is also a choir master.
General François Lecointre
Général François Lecointre is a graduate from Saint-Cyr Academy, of the French War College and of the Institute of National Defense High Studies (IHEDN). He was appointed Chief of the Defence Staff in 2017. General Lecointre took up the duties of Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor and Chancellor of the National Order of Merit. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his role in overseas operations and the Croix de Valeur Militaire with four commendations, the Grand’Croix of the Legion of Honor and the Grand’Croix of the National Order of Merit.
Giulio de Ligio
Giulio de Ligio is a Lecturer at the Université Catholique de l’Ouest after having graduated from the University of Bologna with a doctorate in Political Thought. He is an associated researcher at the EHESS and the Centre Maurice Hauriou, and has taught at Sciences Po Paris. His research focuses on political thought, philosophy and sociology.
Daniel J. Mahoney
Daniel J. Mahoney is a Senior Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College and professor emeritus at Assumption University. His most recent books are The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation and Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton. He has written books on such French thinkers and statesmen as Raymond Aron, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Charles de Gaulle. He is also a specialist on the thought and art of the Russian Nobel laureate and anti-totalitarian writer and moral witness Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Pierre Manent
Pierre Manent is a French political philosopher. Born in Toulouse in 1949, he studied at the École normale supérieure and passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1971, before becoming the assistant of Raymond Aron at the Collège de France. In 1978 he was among the founders of the review Commentaire. From 1992 until his retirement in 2014, he was directeur d’études at the Centre Raymond Aron of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and he has regularly taught as a visiting professor in the Political Science Department of Boston College. His books include Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, The City of Man, A World beyond Politics?, Metamorphoses of the City and Natural Law and Human Rights, as well as Montaigne. La vie sans loi (2014), Situation de la France (2015) and Pascal et la proposition chrétienne (2022), which won the Prix Chateaubriand. He received the Prix Victor-Delbos of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 2002 and the Prix du cardinal Lustiger of the Académie française in 2016 for his body of work.
Edouard Martin
Edouard Martin is Associate Professor (maître de conférences) of Legal History at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Management of the Université Catholique de l’Ouest. He read Law at Panthéon-Assas Université (BA) before studying at Oxford University and Sciences Po Paris, where he obtained an MA in Public Affairs. In 2021 he received his PhD in legal history from Université Paris-Saclay with a thesis on the deposition of rulers in the public law of the medieval West (11th-15th centuries). His research focuses on medieval public and canon law, the history of Church-State relations and the history of legal thought, including the work of Michel Villey and Pierre Legendre.
Françoise Melonio
Françoise Melonio, professor emeritus of Sorbonne University and Doctor of Letters, is the editor of Tocqueville’s collected works. She has taught in secondary schools, and has been a professor at Nanterre, at the Sorbonne, and at Sciences Po. She was deputy director of the ENS (Ulm) and director of studies and schooling at Sciences Po. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and has served as President of the Tocqueville Society. She is a member of the board of the Tocqueville Foundation and of the editorial board of The Tocqueville Review. She is preparing an intellectual biography of Tocqueville, to be published by Gallimard.
Joshua Mitchell
Joshua Mitchell is Professor of political theory at Georgetown University. His areas of interest range from the ancient world to contemporary America and Europe. His thinking has been deeply informed by Alexis de Tocqueville. He has also published on Plato, Hobbes, the future of the Middle East, and identity politics. Dr. Mitchell received a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in sociology from the University of Washington, and a B.G.S. from the University of Michigan. He has published articles in The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Religion, APSR, and Political Theory. He has served as acting chancellor of The American University of Iraq—Sulaimani and associate dean of faculty affairs at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Thomas Pavel
Thomas Pavel is the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Romance Languages and Literature, Comparative Literature, in the Committee on Social Thought, Fundamentals, and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His interests lie in the history of the novel, 17th- century French literature, 20th-century French literature and intellectual life, the interactions between literature and philosophy, and the way in which literature understands human action and its moral requirements. In addition to publishing fiction of his own, he has written on the plays of Corneille, English Renaissance tragedy, the art of listening, the logic of the novel, and the inadequacy of poststructuralism. He holds a doctorate from the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. A Romanian emigré, he has also taught at the University of Ottawa and Université du Québec of Montréal, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Princeton University. In 2023 he received Le Grand Prix de la Francophonie from the Académie Française.
Madeleine Rouot
Madeleine Rouot holds a PhD in political thought and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge, where she also earned her MPhil. A specialist in the French liberal tradition, she works on the origins of meritocracy, especially in the thought of François Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on the evolution of the idea of aristocracy among nineteenth-century French and English liberals. She has served as a ministerial adviser and teaches at Sciences Po.
Armand Rouvier
Armand Rouvier holds a PhD from the EHESS, where he wrote his dissertation under the supervision of Patrice Gueniffey. He studies the intellectual history of conservatism and the history of French and British political thought. He is the author of a widely-reviewed book on the history and relevance of French conservatism: Peut-on encore être conservateur ? Histoire d’une idée incomprise en France (Buchet Chastel, 2023).
Céline Spector
Céline Spector is Professor at the Philosophy Department of Sorbonne University. Her research includes work in modern and contemporary political theory, especially the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu, Rousseau and their legacy. Among her recent publications: Rousseau (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019); Rousseau et la critique de l’économie politique (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2017); Rousseau et Locke. Dialogues critiques, with J. Lenne-Cornuez (Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment, Liverpool University Press, 2022); Émile. Rousseau et la morale expérimentale (Vrin, 2022).
Laëtitia Strauch-Bonart
Laëtitia Strauch-Bonart is a writer and journalist. After preparatory classes at Henri IV, she was accepted at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and later graduated in Public Affairs at Sciences Po Paris. An expert in the thought of the late Sir Roger Scruton, she translated one of his works as De l’urgence d’être conservateur, 2016. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Opinion pages of L’Express, a weekly newspaper.
Lieutenant-General Olivier Tramond
Lieutenant-General Olivier Tramond is a graduate from Saint-Cyr Academy, of the French War College and of the Institute of National Defense High Studies (IHEDN); he served for 38 years in the French military as an airborne infantry marine officer. During his career, he toured in various places in the world and eventually joined national political-military assignments. Upon leaving the military, he worked for various Defense firms as military advisor and international affairs and as consultant for “the Normandy Memory” project dedicated to the Normandy campaign. He is currently on the Board of Directors of the American Battlefield Monuments Foundation (ABMF) and a member of the Board of the Society of the Cincinnati France.
Paul Yowell
Paul Yowell is the Benn Fellow and Tutor in Law at Oriel College and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. He teaches constitutional law and theory, comparative constitutional law, and philosophy of law. He is the author of Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design: Moral and Empirical Reasoning in Judicial Review and co-author of Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation, and is currently writing a book on comparative constitutional law called World Constitutional Systems.
June 27 to July 8, 2027
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris. Applications open at the end of December; the deadline is February 28, 2027.