Collège de France

About Collège de France

The Collège de France is a public institution for higher education and research unique in the world. Since its creation in 1530, it has responded to a dual mission: to be the place for the most audacious research and for its teaching. It teaches all interested audiences, free of charge and without any registration or diploma requirements, "knowledge as it is being constituted in all fields of letters, sciences, or arts," and conducts cutting-edge research in partnership with major French and international scientific institutions. One of the essential missions of the Collège de France is the dissemination of the most current knowledge, either by welcoming the public to its auditoriums or by relaying audiovisual recordings of its teachings, freely available on its website. The Collège de France is organized into chairs, with between 40 and 50 permanent chairs each occupied by a professor, as well as about ten annual or multi-year chairs. The Collège de France also houses numerous experimental and human sciences laboratories and constitutes a community of approximately 1000 researchers, engineers, technicians, administrative staff, and librarians. The chairs, laboratories, and libraries cover a vast range of fields: from mathematics to the study of great ancient civilizations, including physics, chemistry, biology and medicine, philosophy and literature, social sciences and economics, archaeology and history… The Collège de France website is at the heart of the institution's life and its mission of disseminating knowledge. It offers in particular the schedule of teachings and event news, a very large number of courses and conferences in audio and video, as well as access to electronic publications published by the institution. The Collège de France is an associated member of PSL.