Pierre Serna
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
.jpg)
Pierre Serna (born September 28, 1963) is a French historian specializing in the French Revolution. He is currently a professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and a member of the Institute for the History of the French Revolution (UMS 622 / CNRS), which he directed from 2008 to 2015, before its integration into the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History (IHMC).
A former student of the Lycée Masséna in Nice, where he studies history under Emile Llorca, Serna continued his education in Paris at the Lycée Henri-IV and the Lycée Lakanal, then from 1984 at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He undertook his first research under the suprervision of Michel Vovelle, who had successed Albert Soboul two years earlier. He obtained the aggregation of history in 1986 and taught successively at the Lycée Faidherbe in Lille, at the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, then at the University of Catania in Sicily, as a reader / linguistic attaché for services events of the French Embassy in Italy.
He devoted his doctoral thesis to an unrecognized revolutionary aristocrat, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle. In 1998, following the publication of this thesis, he obtained the grand history prize of the General Council of Bouches-du-Rhône, awarded by a jury chaired by historians Maurice Agulhon and Robert-Henri Bautier.
He was a lecturer in modern history at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne from 1995 to 1998, before being appointed to Paris I at the start of the 1999 academic year. In 2008, he became a university professor and took charge of the 'Institute for the History of the French Revolution, the tenth professor since Alphonse Aulard and the seventh director since its foundation by Georges Lefebvre and Jean Zay in 1937. He held this position from 2008 to 2015, the date of his integration into the Institute of modern and contemporary history (IHMC).
Since October 1, 2019, he has been a member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
He runs the electronic review La Révolution française.[1]
He has been vice-president of the International Commission for the History of the French Revolution since 2010.[2]
He is also scientific director of the digitization of the Parliamentary Archives[3] in collaboration with Persée, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne)[4] and the Institut d'histoire de la Révolution française.
In 2025, Pierre Serna was suspended from teaching and research for a year, following a decision by the disciplinary board of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, based on accusations of psychological harassment.[5]
