Patrick Boucheron was born in Paris in 1965. After completing his secondary education at the Lycée Marcelin-Berthelot (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés) and the Lycée Henri-IV (Paris), he entered the École Normale Supérieure in Saint-Cloud in 1985 and passed the agrégation in history in 1988. In 1994, under the supervision of Pierre Toubert, he defended his doctoral thesis in medieval history at the University of Paris 1, published four years later under the title Le pouvoir de bâtir. Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIVe-XVe siècles), Rome, École française de Rome, 1998 (Collection de l'EFR, 239).
Lecturer in medieval history at the École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud from 1994 to 1999, then at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne from 1999, he was a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France from 2004 to 2009. In 2009, he defended a habilitation entitled La trace et l'aura (trace and aura ) at the University of Paris 1 (guarantor : Jean-Philippe Genet), and was elected professor of medieval history at the same university in 2012. From 2015 to 2020, he was Chairman 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 to 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 the monumental expression of princely power, considering this history in all its dimensions, from the most material (edifice economy, construction techniques) to the most abstract (political thought and architectural styles). They have led him in two main directions : on the one hand, a synthetic grasp of the urban fact in a comparative history on a European scale, and on the other, an analysis of the historical sociology of Artistic creation, based on several investigations into 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 has sought to reconfigure a history of power since the Middle Ages, in his lectures at the Collège de France since 2018 and in the publications he has generated.