Eugénie Bastié

Eugénie Bastié (born 18 November 1991) is a French journalist, columnist and essayist. A journalist in the debates and opinion department of Le Figaro, she is also a regular political commentator on French television (CNews) and radio (Europe 1). Her essays address contemporary feminism, the place of intellectuals in public life, cultural conflict and freedom of thought.

Early life and education Eugénie Bastié was born in Toulouse on 18 November 1991. She is one of five children raised in a Catholic household, where her father worked as a landscaper and her mother specialised in nuclear medicine. She grew up in the village of Pibrac, near Toulouse.

Bastié was educated at the private, boarding school Saint Jean de Lectoure then attended the Paris Institute of Political Studies, graduating in 2014 with a Master in Public Affairs (MPA). She went on to earn a master's degree in Philosophy at Paris-Sorbonne University.

Career While still a student at Sciences Po, Bastié began contributing to the French magazine Causeur, with her first article published in December 2012. She completed an internship at Figaro-Vox, the opinion and debate platform of Le Figaro newspaper where she was subsequently hired in 2014. In 2015, she co-launched Limite, a magazine dedicated to Integral Ecology, a central theme of Catholic Social Teaching. In 2019 she left Limite, the magazine that she co-founded.

During the 2019–20 season Bastié contributed to the program on BFMTV as columnist, she also contributed to the program , debating current affairs opposing Alain Duhamel. In July 2020 she left the network to become a political commentator on television news channel CNews; In May 2021 Bastié hosted her own show entitled . In September 2021 she joined with two other commentators in replacement of Eric Zemmour. In 2022 she launched a new program on Figaro TV titled , and started a new program on the radio station Europe 1. In 2023 Bastié published a new essay called (The dictatorship of feelings), and (Save the difference between the sexes).

Essays and intellectual work Bastié’s essays focus on contemporary feminism, relations between the sexes, ideological conflict and the conditions of public debate. In La Guerre des idées: Enquête au cœur de l’intelligentsia française (2021), written after three years of research and interviews with around thirty thinkers from different political backgrounds, she examined the changing role of intellectuals in France and the fragmentation of the country’s intellectual life. In Sauver la différence des sexes and La Dictature des ressentis, both published in 2023, she continued her examination of sex, identity, emotion and individual experience in contemporary political discourse.

Reception Bastié’s essays have attracted attention for their engagement with contemporary cultural and ideological disputes. Le Point described Le Porc émissaire as a “counter-current” examination of the consequences and perceived excesses of the #MeToo movement. Discussing La Guerre des idées, the magazine presented Bastié as an essayist with a taste for intellectual debate and described the book as an examination of French intellectual life that defended debate as a “conflictual conversation”. In a 2021 profile prompted by the same book, Le Temps praised the narrative force of her writing and compared aspects of her intellectual posture to that of Germaine de Staël. In an opinion column published by Le Figaro, Élisabeth Lévy described La Dictature des ressentis as “a small light in the night”. In March 2023, The Times described Bastié as a "leading French columnist" in its coverage of Sauver la différence des sexes, presenting the essay as part of a wider French debate over biological sex, gender identity and the influence of Anglo-American ideas. Later that month, philosopher Kathleen Stock, writing in UnHerd, discussed the essay in the context of French intellectual and political debates over the social significance of biological sex.

Publications

Credited as contributor (with François-Xavier Bellamy, Mathieu Bock-Côté and more)