Jacques Sémelin | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Sémelin during a talk at a book shop inCôte-des-Neiges, 2017 | |
| Born | 1951 (age 74–75) |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Paris Descartes University |
| Alma mater | Paris IV |
| Influences | Léon Poliakov |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Sub-discipline | Contemporary history |
| Main interests | Genocide studies |
| Notable works | OEMV |
Jacques Sémelin is a French historian and political scientist. He is a professor atSciences Po Paris and senior researcher at theFrench National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His main fields of study are theHolocaust, mass violence,civil resistance and rescue in genocidal situations, and more recently the survival of Jews in France during the Second World War. In 1998, he created a pioneering course on genocides and massacres at Sciences Po Paris. He is the founder of theOnline Encyclopedia of Mass Violence.[1][2]
Sémelin has a transdisciplinary education in contemporary history, social psychology and political science. He obtained his PhD in Contemporary History at theSorbonne (Paris IV, 1986) and was Post-Doctoral Fellow atHarvard University at theCenter for International Affairs (1986–1988). Previously, he was a social and clinical psychologist as a former master graduate from theParis Institute of Psychology. In 1990, he joined the CNRS as a Research Fellow in Political Science. He started teaching at theEcole des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales and joined Sciences Po Paris in 1998, where he created a pioneering transdisciplinary course on genocide and extreme violence.
Much of Sémelin's work is concerned with the question of how "ordinary people" can commit "extraordinary crimes" such as genocide. He also studies civil resistance and the ways that unarmed civilians have resisted authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
Sémelin devoted his PhD studies to the comparative analysis of some 30 examples of civil resistance in Nazi Europe, summarized in his bookUnarmed Against Hitler (1994), available now in five languages. Following this research, he then inquired about the development of civil resistance in Communist Europe (through media strategies) until the fall of the Berlin Wall. He published his results in a new book,Freedom Over the Airwaves (1997; published in English in 2016 by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict ([1] )). In 2014, he received the James Lawson Award for his research, awarded at Tufts University by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.[3]
Meanwhile, Sémelin became increasingly engaged in holocaust genocide studies, especially after visitingAuschwitz. He began to work on his master book on mass violence:Purify and Destroy (2007), available now in eight languages. For this book, he was awarded a prize by the Association Française de Science Politique and received the Figaro-Sciences Po Prize in 2007. In 2008, Sémelin founded massviolence.org at Sciences Po under the sponsorship of Simone Veil and Esther Mujawayo. This online encyclopedia is no longer active due to a lack of funds but the archives are still available online.[4]
In 2010, Sémelin was appointed as consultant to the United Nations for the genocide prevention (Office of political affairs).
Sémelin has also initiated a new research program on rescue in genocidal situations. He is co-founder of theLieu de Mémoire, a museum chronicling theFrench Resistance, inChambon-sur-Lignon, where Jewish children and adults were saved during the Nazi occupation.[5] In 2006, Sémelin co-directed an international symposium on genocidal rescue practices at Sciences Po. The proceedings were published in 2010, under the titleResisting Genocide.
Subsequently, Sémelin engaged in a study to understand how 75% of Jews in France survived the Holocaust. The resulting book,Persécutions et entraides dans la France occupée (2013), was awarded thePrix Phillipe Viannay by the Fondation de la Résistance and the "Emerald" Prize of the Académie Française. Taking into account the many debates aroused by his book, especially with American historianRobert Paxton,[6] Sémelin wrote an abridged and revised version, published in 2018 and prefaced by Serge Klarsfeld (reference), under the titleThe Survival of the Jews in France, 1940–44. This book has been published in English by Oxford University Press (USA) and Hurst (UK) and in German at Wallstein.
In his autobiographical bookJ'arrive où je suis étranger (2007) (I Arrive Where I Feel a Stranger), Sémelin speaks openly about his struggle against an inexorable blindness. In 2016, he also publishedJe veux croire au soleil, a humorous account of his stay in Montréal as a visually impaired professor, based on anecdotes from everyday life.
