Patrick Weil
French political scientist (born 1956)
Patrick Weil (born 14 October 1956 in Neuilly sur Seine) is a political scientist. He is a senior research fellow at CNRS, at the Centre for the social history of the 20th century at the University of Paris 1. His research focuses on comparative citizenship, immigration law and constitutional law.
He received his master's degree in public law from ESSEC business school before obtaining his doctorate in political science. He worked as cabinet logistical head of the Secretariat of State for immigrants in 1981 and 1982, and was a member of the Stasi Commission and of the board of the Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration (Museum of the History of Immigration) - a position which, with seven others, he resigned on 18 May 2007, in protest against the creation of a ministry of immigration and national identity by Nicolas Sarkozy.
He is president of the non-governmental organisation Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries Without Borders).
He is currently a visiting professor of law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow and senior research scholar at Yale Law School in Connecticut, US.
Weil is the author of Le Sens de la République (Grasset 2016 with Nicolas Truong); The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (Univ of Penn Press, 2013); How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Duke Univ. Press 2008); Qu'est-ce qu'un Français? : Histoire de la nationalité française de la Révolution à nos jours (Grasset 2002)
In Le Monde in 2014, Weil wrote that Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower, was entitled "to obtain constitutional asylum, a specific French protection for "freedom fighters".
He was shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize for The Madman in the White House.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Patrick Weil” as french political scientist (born 1956). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3369948. VIAF identifies the subject as 54199467. The Library of Congress control number is n92004546. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1981, 1982 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patrick Weil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.