I.
Cognitive integrity
Not undergoing, without one’s knowledge, the exploitation of one’s cognitive or behavioural vulnerabilities.
HABEAS MENTEM
HABEAS MENTEM
The manifesto
Conquering cognitive autonomy in Europe
Habeas Corpus protected the person against arbitrary detention; Habeas Mentem protects the mind against algorithmic capture.
ScrollWe have learned to protect our person: our freedoms, our privacy and our data. But a new frontier of freedom is emerging: the conditions in which we form our own judgment.
And our judgment?
For decades, Europe lived in a world it believed stable. It outsourced part of its security, its energy, its infrastructures and its technological power. It is now discovering that these dependencies are not only economic or geopolitical. They are also cognitive.
Our digital environments select what we see, organise what holds our attention, anticipate our reactions and gradually build representations of ourselves. Artificial intelligence adds a new capacity: that of producing, personalising and interacting at a scale that transforms the very conditions of our relation to information.
The problem is not influence as such, for we have always been influenced by one form of propaganda or another. The problem appears when that influence becomes invisible, personalised, automated and capable of exploiting our vulnerabilities without our being able to understand, choose or contest the mechanisms that organise it.
Europe has begun to respond to this transformation. The GDPR protects our data. The Digital Services Act frames the large platforms and their recommender systems. The AI Act prohibits certain manipulative practices and imposes new obligations of transparency. The platforms and the assistants themselves offer tools for control, resetting or memory management.
These protections are considerable, and this edifice exists nowhere else: it is properly European. But they remain dispersed.
What is still missing is the lens that connects them: the right to remain the author of one’s own judgment.
No one may dispose of the liberty of a person.
No one should dispose, without our knowledge, of the conditions of our judgment.
That is the meaning of Habeas Mentem. In 1679, Habeas Corpus set a decisive limit to arbitrariness: the power cannot dispose of the person without justification.
Three and a half centuries later, another dimension of the person appears vulnerable: the mind, under the effect of algorithms. Habeas Mentem extends the intuition that no one should be able to dispose, without our knowledge, of the conditions in which a person forms a judgment.
It is not a matter of protecting citizens against ideas, nor of creating a police of truth. Nor is it a matter of suppressing influence. It is a matter of protecting the capacity to judge.
Habeas Mentem rests on three principles. Three protections that are one day to become enforceable rights:
Not undergoing, without one’s knowledge, the exploitation of one’s cognitive or behavioural vulnerabilities.
Being able to choose the main conditions in which one’s attention is solicited, organised and held.
Knowing why a piece of information is shown to us, identifying the mechanisms that determine its visibility, accessing other modes of selection, contesting them and modifying one’s informational environment.
These principles call for two instruments to make them effective:
Not being permanently locked into the inferences that systems have produced about us. A machine may learn who we have been; it must not have the last word on who we can become.
Turning transparency into the power to act. Understand, choose, contest. And, where necessary, obtain redress.
Habeas Mentem therefore does not propose a new form of paternalistic protection. It rests, on the contrary, on a demanding confidence in the citizen.
To each principle corresponds a responsibility: not to manipulate, to respect the attention of others, not to knowingly degrade the common informational space. And to these responsibilities is added a duty to oneself: to maintain one’s capacity of judgment through education, reading and the exercise of critical thinking. For no technology, no law and no State will ever be able to think in our place.
The stake of our generation is surely there: to ensure that the technologies which shape our cognitive environment remain instruments of our freedom, and not the invisible masters of our attention.
Europe has progressively learned to protect the person, their liberty, their voice, their privacy and their data. Habeas Mentem proposes to extend that ambition to the mind – one day, perhaps, as far as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union.
Not the right to think rightly, but the right to remain the author of one’s own thought.
Habeas Mentem. Conquering Cognitive Autonomy in Europe – the manifesto by Aymeric Bourdin and Michaël Malherbe (August 2026). Leave your address: the download opens straight away.
English edition. Version française disponible.
Aymeric Bourdin has practised the diplomacy of ideas for twenty years. A graduate of Sciences Po Paris in European affairs, in 2017 he took over the presidency of Atelier Europe, a think tank founded in the aftermath of the French referendum of 2005. He continues to develop its study trips to the capitals of the EU. The method consists in exploring Europe at eye level: in the ministries, the newsrooms, the companies and the cafés where local opinions and decisions take shape. In parallel, he serves as a mission director at Cigref since 2023, where he helps build the dialogue between large corporate users of digital technology and public authorities. He has also headed the Institut des Transitions, which he joined in 2020 to articulate the energy transition with the digital revolution. The author of books and opinion pieces on European sovereignty and the third industrial revolution, he speaks in universities, institutions and the media on the continent’s strategic autonomy. He holds the conviction that Europe will not carry weight through the norm alone, but through the progressive development of a common public space.
Michaël Malherbe has been deciphering the communication of the European institutions for fifteen years. A graduate of the IEP of Strasbourg and holder of the master’s degree in political and social communication of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, he has run the blog Lacomeuropéenne since 2007, now a French-language reference on the Union’s narrative strategies. He has taught in the European studies master’s programme at Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III) and the European affairs master’s at Paris IV. He co-authored a study of twenty years of digital communication by the European institutions (Communication & langages, 2015). Secretary-General of Atelier Europe, he develops its positions on cognitive warfare and the continent’s informational security. After an agency career within the WPP group, he works in leadership advocacy. He defends the thesis that European democracy is not defended by issuing rules, but by reconquering the narrative.