Bertrand Badie is a professor at Sciences Po Paris and a leading expert in international relations. He is the author of some thirty reference books, including Le Temps de humiliés, published by Odile Jacob.

What is it like to be born between two cultures? How do you live with it? How can you bring them together, pacify them, so that they become an inner strength?
This book begins on 16 September 1928, when Mansour Badie, the author’s father, arrived at Gare du Nord with his whole family, at the age of 18, after an eventful journey from Rezâ Shâh Pahlavi’s Persia. The young man, in search of the Western dream, found himself on France’s school benches, enrolled in medical school, and in the arms of a young bourgeois woman, who overcame social prejudices and married him. Despite this happy union, Mansour’s dreams were soon dashed by reality: despite being an emergency doctor during the war, engaged in the Resistance, he was not allowed to set up his practice after the Liberation.
An ode to a revered and beloved father. This book also tells the story of how a young Bertrand, called racist names at his Catholic secondary school, overcame this humiliation to open up to the complexity of a world in the midst of decolonial change, deciphered the new North-South relations, and treasured his biculturalism as a gift.