Biographical
I was born on September 11th 1944 in Casablanca, Morocco, in a Jewish family with mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazi origins. My father’s parents were teachers at the Alliance Israëlite universelle (AIU), which operated a network of schools dedicated to the dissemination of French language and culture throughout Jewish communities in North African and Mid-Eastern countries. My paternal grandfather had been one of the first students of the AIU school in the town of Marrakesh, in the last years of the nineteenth century. My paternal grandmother had studied at the same time in Tetouan, in the part of northern Morocco under Spanish influence, in the first AIU school, which had been founded there in 1863. After completing their school years, they both decided to become teachers and, unbeknownst to each other, came to France at the very beginning of the 20th century, to get their degree from the AIU teacher training school in Paris. Although they were both there at the same time, they did not meet then since the boys’ and girls’ schools were separated.
I found a few years ago in one of my grandfather’s notebooks a handwritten recollection of his souvenirs as a young teenager suddenly immersed in 1900 Belle Epoque Paris, seeing for the first time automobiles and trains, enjoying theater shows and silent movies, experiencing with bewilderment a modernity contrasting so much with the medieval atmosphere of Marrakesh at that time. My paternal grandparents met shortly after graduating and returning to Morocco, at the time this country became a French protectorate. They soon married and had seven children, while moving from school to school on successive assignments, ending as headmaster and headmistress of the boys and girl’s AIU schools in the town of Salé, near Rabat. My father, born in 1920, was raised there and studied law in Rabat, becoming a lawyer at the beginning of the Second World War.
My mother’s family emigrated from Russia in the 1920s, in the years following the Bolshevik revolution. Her parents were physicians and chose to settle in Morocco, a country where their Russian medical degrees were recognized. My mother, born in Odessa in 1921, was raised in Casablanca and met my father at the university in Rabat, just before the war, while she was studying to become a teacher in French and German literature. In my early childhood, I was raised in Russian as well as in French, and I remained bilingual until I went to elementary school at the age of six, unfortunately then very quickly losing my fluency in Russian. The community of Russian Jewish immigrants in Casablanca had kept strong links and I remember meeting many of them in my grandparents’ house. Among them was an architect, Casimir Zeligson, who has built several of the Art Nouveau building and villas which still give a special character to the town of Casablanca. The Zeligsons had a daughter, Claudine, with whom my younger brother Joël and I used to play. After a long separation, I met her again in Paris fifteen years later, but here I am anticipating.
I have kept strong memories of this time in Casablanca, of the warm Mediterranean weather, the long rainless summers and mild winters with their flowering bougainvillea and hibiscuses, bathing in the cold Atlantic Ocean whose waves can be so strong and treacherous, especially to a young child. Some remembrances are particularly vivid, like the recurring sirocco storms covering everything with a blanket of sand coming from the Sahara, or the locust invasions, which on several occasions have plagued the fields in the countryside around the city, leaving them barren after they had gone. During the last years of my life there, I witnessed the events leading to the independence of Morocco from the French, understanding that, amid the convulsions and sometime violent events, history was in the making.
When independence finally came in 1956, my parents decided, like many Jews, to leave Morocco and settle in France with their sons Joël, Gilles and me (a fourth son, Michel, was born in Paris in 1959). This was essentially a cultural choice. They had received and given to their children a French education and thought that France was the natural place for the family to go. The first years in Paris were difficult, requiring a painful adjustment, especially during the damp and dark winters, contrasting so much with the vivid colors of the Moroccan weather. Learning at school was a consolation, though. I was a very good student, immediately at the head of my class in the Lycée Carnot where I studied until the “Baccalauréat,” the final degree of the French high school education.
I was indiscriminately interested in literature, history, mathematics and physical sciences. In humanities, I could share my tastes with my parents, who raised my three brothers and me to love reading, going to museums and discussing all kind of issues ranging from ancient history to modern politics. In scientific matters, I was on my own, however, the first in the family to wander in a domain which required a mathematics background. I remember how, early on, I was fascinated by astronomy and by calculus, the notion of derivatives and simple differential equations which describe so directly and so well the laws of dynamics obeyed by moving bodies. This was the time of the first artificial satellites, the sputniks which orbited the earth and launched the American-Soviet race to the moon.
I marveled at the fact that I was able, with the elementary calculus I knew, to compute the escape velocity of rockets, the periods of satellites on their orbits and the gravitational field at the surface of all the planets … I understood then that nature obeys mathematical laws, a fact that did not cease to astonish me. I knew, from that time on, that I wanted to be a scientist. For that, I embarked in the strenuous and demanding “classes préparatoires” of the famed Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, one of the preparatory schools which train the best French students for the contest examinations leading to the “Grandes Ecoles.” They are the engineering and academic schools, which since the French Revolution, have formed the scientific elite of France. These were two years of intensive study where I learned a lot of math and of classical physics. I eventually was admitted in 1963 to the Ecole Polytechnique (ranking first in the national examination, to the great pride of my parents) and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). I chose to enter the latter because, at that time, it offered a much better opportunity to embark in a scientist career.
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Source:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2012/haroche/biographical/
