Vincent Lemire, historian and geographer, was born into a long-established Parisian family. From his apartment on the top floor of a main boulevard overlooking the city's northern neighborhoods, he told the story of how he became an adopted Jerusalemite. A professor at l’Université Gustave-Eiffel, former director of the French Research Center in Jerusalem and author of the 2022 graphic novel Histoire de Jérusalem ("History of Jerusalem," with Christophe Gaultier), Lemire is a specialist in the contemporary history of a territory that is currently in flames. His long-term perspective sheds light on the chaos of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Le Monde, the 50-year-old looks back at the origins of his vocation, starting with the creation of his first comic strip, which was sold under the table to his fellow high school friends.
I'm a purebred Parisian! I grew up in Montparnasse, and all four of my grandparents were also from Paris. My genealogy is very homogeneous geographically, but socially, I've always felt like I came from a mixed couple. On the one hand, there were my paternal grandparents, who ran a small hairdressing salon in Pigalle. They didn't have a car and got around by train and moped. Their holidays were spent in the Auvergne, swimming in the river, gardening and watching TV in the dining room in the evening. A simple life with popular leisure activities. On my mother's side, it was the intellectual bourgeoisie of the Left Bank, a beautiful apartment and summer holidays in England.
From very early on, this question of mixing shaped my vision of the world. But I first experienced it in its socio-economic dimension, whereas today we approach this question from the angle of ethnic or religious origins. And yet, in the 19th century as today, in Paris as in Jerusalem, the upper classes dine in the same salons, and working-class people mix in the same working-class neighborhoods!
This conviction comes from my childhood: I understand that I come from two distinct worlds. In fact, my parents got married on May 1, 1968. Perhaps it was this particular period that allowed a student from Nanterre, the son of a hairdresser, to marry a girl from the bourgeoisie. My father became a French teacher, and my mother pursued a career as an actress and then as an assistant director.
No, I was even a distracted student, with conduct warnings and the threat of repeating a year. I went to high school at the Lycée Montaigne, in the sixth arrondissement. My real passion was drawing and comics. With a friend, Pascal Sibertin-Blanc, we created a comic strip in which we caricatured our teachers. We photocopied, stapled and taped the whole thing together, then sold these harmless comics under the table. So, it's no coincidence that, 30 years later, I launched Histoire de Jérusalem, a much riskier project!
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