Patrick Boucheron was born in 1965 in Paris. After attending high school at the Lycée Marcelin-Berthelot (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés) and then the Lycée Henri-IV (Paris), he entered the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1985 and earned his agrégation in history in 1988. Under the supervision of Pierre Toubert, he defended his doctoral dissertation in medieval history at the University of Paris 1 in 1994; it was published four years later under the title Le pouvoir de bâtir. Urban Planning and Municipal Policy in Milan (14th–15th Centuries), Rome, École française de Rome, 1998 (Collection de l’EFR, 239).
He served as a lecturer in medieval history at the École normale supérieure in Fontenay-Saint-Cloud from 1994 to 1999, then at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne beginning in 1999, and was a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France from 2004 to 2009. In 2009, he defended his habilitation thesis at the University of Paris 1, titled La trace et l’aura (supervisor: Jean-Philippe Genet), and was appointed professor of medieval history at the same university in 2012. From 2015 to 2020, he served as president of the scientific council of the École française de Rome. In 2015, he was elected professor at the Collège de France, holding the chair “History of Powers in Western Europe, 13th-16th century,” delivering his opening lecture on December 17, 2015 ( Ce que peut l’histoire, Collège de France/Fayard, 2016).
His work initially focused on the urban history of medieval Italy and on the monumental expression of princely power, examining this history in all its dimensions, from the most material (the economics of urban administration, construction techniques) to the most abstract (political thought and architectural styles). This led him in two main directions: on the one hand, a synthetic grasp of the urban phenomenon through a comparative historical approach on a European scale; on the other hand, the analysis of the historical sociology of artistic creation based on several studies conducted on political painting, illuminations, and funerary sculpture. This line of research has led to the formulation of concepts such as “political fictions” and “political experiences,” around which he seeks to reconfigure, in his teaching at the Collège de France since 2018 and in the publications it has inspired, a history of power since the Middle Ages.
