Translator: Mohand Habchi Reviewer: eric vautier
The world is my country.
That’s what I can say today.
Indeed, I have the whole world in my head.
And now, I’ll explain why.
When I was a kid, I had a big dream:
to visit all the countries of the world,
and a big problem: not a round.
I left in 1955,
at the age of 17 –
I was cute like everything at the time –
(Laughter)
with 10 francs in his pocket.
I do not dare to talk to young people now, the 50s,
because they take me downright for the cro-magnon man.
I tell them: we did not have the phone at home,
no TV, no guide of the backpacker.
there were no jet planes, they were propeller planes.
At the time, there was no information in sum.
And at the time, you needed a visa for Spain, Germany,
Great Britain.
We were not talking about travel in 55, we were rebuilding the country of war.
I left at a time when it was an impossible dream and even crazy.
I never thought I realized that, yet it’s done today.
And it happened in two periods:
a first trip, the black line on the map,
which lasted 18 years without going home.
Not fast the guy!
(Laughter)
We will not leave for a weekend anyway!
I came back because I was sick of dysentery,
and then I was furious, I missed countries.
The red lines that we see, I was in France –
it’s a little spider web – for thirty years.
Thirty years !
I went every year six, seven or eight months to finalize my dream.
So, to visit all the countries, all the territories of the world, it’s done.
There are many problems in the world,
and there is one when you travel, which you all know,
it’s communication.
I did not plan anything, everything went on in spite of myself,
and I say it back, because as I said, I did not plan.
I spent the first seven years learning languages,
by doing odd jobs in Europe, on the spot,
and I learned English, Spanish, German and Italian.
Between Spain and Germany, I spent two years in Congo.
At the time, there was military service,
and I was in Congo to avoid the Algerian war.
I do not have a sieve vocation.
(Laughter)
Then I wanted to learn Russian,
but there, the great USSR, no visa.
In the workers’ paradise, they did not want one more worker.
So finally, I abbreviate,
after many stories, I landed in Canada in 1965,
and there, I discover something that I did not know,
we are paying more in North America than in Europe.
There, I finally realized that I could save for my dream.
And for three years I saved in Toronto as a translator.
With three years of savings,
I have held the last six years of those eighteen years without working.
And that’s where I managed this journey in black,
by spending my savings in Canada
the dollar a day.
Very good for the line.
(Laughter)
Very bad for the stomach, I’m not telling you.
This dollar, why?
For two major reasons: one, I did not pay for transportation.
I did everything in hitchhiking,
in all, 400,000 kilometers.
It’s not nothing, it’s the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
I made 300,000 with this one and 100,000 with the other.
(Laughter)
There are clever people who drive on the left.
(Laughter)
The problem of the stop around the world,
it’s because two-thirds of the Earth is water.
So I had to hitchhike, sailboat and hovercraft.
The other reason for the dollar is that I have never slept at the hotel.
You saw the first picture in Alaska, it was -45 ° C.
There, you have to find the shelter within five minutes,
otherwise we find ourselves at Findus, in the frozen department.
(Laughter)
So this dollar went into food and visas,
but you must not be difficult.
I did not eat in restaurants but in markets,
roadside carts.
One day, a truck passed me and lost carrots on 20 m.
I picked up everything!
I made the rabbit, after, for ten days.
(Laughter)
What did I mean here?
(Laughter)
It’s menopause!
(Laughter)
Do not laugh, it’ll fall on you too.
(Laughter)
So there was a lot of experiences.
For example, I lived with the bonzes in Bangkok,
in yoga schools in India; I worked in a kibbutz in Israel;
I was living at the famous doctor Albert Schweitzer in his hospital
in Lambarene, Gabon;
I was living at the hippies in San Francisco,
to Haight Ashbury, from the time of their greatness,
and among the so-called head cutters.
There are a lot of experiences. I was also put in prison seven times!
You noticed as soon as I got home, that I look dangerous.
(Laughter)
I also almost killed myself
a dozen times.
I have been deported several times.
I love being deported, by the way, it’s free.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But, you have to be deported in the right direction!
(Laughter)
I tell you all this very briefly,
because stories, I would have to spend the night.
It’s to make you understand how I did my universities, okay?
You’re going to ask me why I did it all.
Me too, I asked myself the question.
It’s not a normal life.
The real real reasons, actually,
appeared after a dozen years.
At first, I had the dream.
Yes, many have the dream of seeing the world,
but we do not keep a life on a dream.
Then there is an insatiable curiosity about me.
At 17 years old like today at 79, the same!
But the real real reasons came after a dozen years,
because I was born before the war.
Hey, for the youngest, it’s the second. Thank you !
I see who calculate.
(Laughter)
I say that because the childhood memories for each of us is very strong.
It’s like an indoor backpack that you carry with you all your life.
And me, that was my first memories of life
because there was war, but not on TV.
We did not have the TV, but we had the Boches.
I remember that as a child, I had a recurring dream, a nightmare.
I saw myself in front of a platoon of the Gestapo shooting me.
It started strong.
I spent a night standing next to Villeneuve-St-Georges
when they bombed the yard, you see.
And today after 70 years,
when I hear the alarm that we try at the town hall
in Boussy-Saint-Antoine where I live,
the first thing there is, I have a twinge in my heart,
and my first reflex, even today, is to run in the cellar
because that noise, for me, announces the bombing.
So what I did was not a “world tour”
the classic world tour today: a year, a circle.
No, that’s not it, look at the map, it zigzags in all directions.
What I did, I prefer to call it a “men’s tour”.
What interested me is not the mileage that is there too,
nor adventure – I do not seek adventure,
but she seeks me and I do not miss –
what interested me was the heart of the man.
I wanted to meet men from all over the world
to know an essential question, following my childhood in the war:
will one day be able to establish peace?
That’s the essential question.
Want to know the answer?
(Public) Yes!
Are you sitting right there?
(Laughter)
For me, peace – it may surprise you what I’m going to say there –
it is not only possible,
it is inevitable.
Peace will happen, that’s what I just said.
I will join you right away because there are some who tell me:
“He did not see the world, him. If that’s exactly what I did!
It is difficult to imagine peace, since we never had it.
We can not imagine what we have never known.
When we look at the past of History, the bloody past,
it’s hard to imagine peace in there, we agree.
There are some who tell me, we always had the war,
then a brilliant conclusion, we will always have war.
Well, they do not look.
Look at Europe, it’s just a series of battles,
of wars, including two world, that’s what I learned.
Yet, there are thirty nations that have succeeded in establishing peace.
We have an example, we can see that it is not impossible.
But for it to be global, of course, there is a lot to fix.
Yes, another idea too,
you have already seen in the countryside, on brambles, caterpillars?
Yuck! It’s full of hair, full of legs, big eyes!
How to imagine the beautiful butterfly that is in there if we did not know?
Impossible !
What we have seen up to that date, in my opinion, is the “caterpillar” period.
I confess with you that it’s almost impossible
to imagine the beautiful butterfly of peace that is in it.
But I say, “If there is a caterpillar, there is a butterfly. “
There is one thing that has just upset the history of men, recently –
It’s new, it just came out –
there is no distance.
Pouf! For the first time in his life,
the great human family is connected, united, interdependent.
We are all in the same boat all of a sudden.
It will have to be taken into account, simply.
Whether the nations love each other or not, whether they want it or not,
they must be in tune –
we’re not going back to the Middle Ages on the back of a donkey, that’s it.
To establish a world of peace, it will be necessary to start with oneself.
It will take a man of peace, there is a logic in there.
And to have a man of peace, in my opinion, there are three steps to take.
You have to start with yourself, because everyone wants that to change,
provided that the others change.
I think you have to pick something.
It is very simple.
it is necessary to think that the Earth, in fact, is only one country.
“The Earth is only one country” is the title of my first book.
The Earth is only one country and all men are its citizens, that’s it.
Second thing, we must think that there is only one human species.
In any case, I only saw one. There are wonderful people everywhere.
We all have a heart and feelings.
We all live between two opposite poles: joy and pain.
Pouf! We are all in the middle.
We must also pick another trick
if we want peace to settle, stay and last.
It is that there are not 36 religions.
No, there is only one!
I would still like to say a word.
The word “religion” is a very sensitive word,
So I would like to specify what I mean by that.
For me, what is religion?
It’s a code of conduct that has been explained to us
by the great educators of humanity or the founders of civilizations.
Why did they explain that to us?
To develop our potential for quality and virtue that we have at the beginning,
to live in society in harmony,
and for those who want to believe in it, prepare for the next world.
It’s a code of conduct and that’s what we need to understand:
it’s the same book for everyone since the beginning.
There is only one book, stop fighting!
But this unique book, like any book, has many chapters.
Why ?
Because humanity is not static but constantly growing,
a new chapter is added regularly
for new understanding and new needs.
But it’s the same book.
In other words, the essence of religions is common.
If everyone turned to their cultural or religious heritage,
there would be no more stories.
I think it’s important – and I emphasize that a little bit –
to understand that there is only one. Let’s stop fighting.
I will take one last picture to make me understand, to be brief.
You know, when you want to build a new house,
what are we doing ?
We will search for new bricks.
We will not make the new house with old rotten bricks.
But a pile of new bricks is just a pile of new bricks.
It does not make a home. It is necessary, before, the plan of the architect.
Once you have the plan and the new materials,
we can build the house, we agree.
So today, it will take this man with the universal spirit
which one needs, and also a plan.
There is no existing system in the world today,
which corresponds to the need of the day.
I tell you that the big horn has started again recently.
Tonight, there was something on TV, the big puppet.
What I want to tell you – and I’ll finish on that –
you will not believe what I am going to say,
but it is because peace is not a wish on my part, a utopia.
She is running. That’s what I saw!
Glory today is not for one who loves his country,
but for the one who loves the whole world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The world is my country.
That’s what I can say today.
Indeed, I have the whole world in my head.
And now, I’ll explain why.
When I was a kid, I had a big dream:
to visit all the countries of the world,
and a big problem: not a round.
I left in 1955,
at the age of 17 –
I was cute like everything at the time –
(Laughter)
with 10 francs in his pocket.
I do not dare to talk to young people now, the 50s,
because they take me downright for the cro-magnon man.
I tell them: we did not have the phone at home,
no TV, no guide of the backpacker.
there were no jet planes, they were propeller planes.
At the time, there was no information in sum.
And at the time, you needed a visa for Spain, Germany,
Great Britain.
We were not talking about travel in 55, we were rebuilding the country of war.
I left at a time when it was an impossible dream and even crazy.
I never thought I realized that, yet it’s done today.
And it happened in two periods:
a first trip, the black line on the map,
which lasted 18 years without going home.
Not fast the guy!
(Laughter)
We will not leave for a weekend anyway!
I came back because I was sick of dysentery,
and then I was furious, I missed countries.
The red lines that we see, I was in France –
it’s a little spider web – for thirty years.
Thirty years !
I went every year six, seven or eight months to finalize my dream.
So, to visit all the countries, all the territories of the world, it’s done.
There are many problems in the world,
and there is one when you travel, which you all know,
it’s communication.
I did not plan anything, everything went on in spite of myself,
and I say it back, because as I said, I did not plan.
I spent the first seven years learning languages,
by doing odd jobs in Europe, on the spot,
and I learned English, Spanish, German and Italian.
Between Spain and Germany, I spent two years in Congo.
At the time, there was military service,
and I was in Congo to avoid the Algerian war.
I do not have a sieve vocation.
(Laughter)
Then I wanted to learn Russian,
but there, the great USSR, no visa.
In the workers’ paradise, they did not want one more worker.
So finally, I abbreviate,
after many stories, I landed in Canada in 1965,
and there, I discover something that I did not know,
we are paying more in North America than in Europe.
There, I finally realized that I could save for my dream.
And for three years I saved in Toronto as a translator.
With three years of savings,
I have held the last six years of those eighteen years without working.
And that’s where I managed this journey in black,
by spending my savings in Canada
the dollar a day.
Very good for the line.
(Laughter)
Very bad for the stomach, I’m not telling you.
This dollar, why?
For two major reasons: one, I did not pay for transportation.
I did everything in hitchhiking,
in all, 400,000 kilometers.
It’s not nothing, it’s the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
I made 300,000 with this one and 100,000 with the other.
(Laughter)
There are clever people who drive on the left.
(Laughter)
The problem of the stop around the world,
it’s because two-thirds of the Earth is water.
So I had to hitchhike, sailboat and hovercraft.
The other reason for the dollar is that I have never slept at the hotel.
You saw the first picture in Alaska, it was -45 ° C.
There, you have to find the shelter within five minutes,
otherwise we find ourselves at Findus, in the frozen department.
(Laughter)
So this dollar went into food and visas,
but you must not be difficult.
I did not eat in restaurants but in markets,
roadside carts.
One day, a truck passed me and lost carrots on 20 m.
I picked up everything!
I made the rabbit, after, for ten days.
(Laughter)
What did I mean here?
(Laughter)
It’s menopause!
(Laughter)
Do not laugh, it’ll fall on you too.
(Laughter)
So there was a lot of experiences.
For example, I lived with the bonzes in Bangkok,
in yoga schools in India; I worked in a kibbutz in Israel;
I was living at the famous doctor Albert Schweitzer in his hospital
in Lambarene, Gabon;
I was living at the hippies in San Francisco,
to Haight Ashbury, from the time of their greatness,
and among the so-called head cutters.
There are a lot of experiences. I was also put in prison seven times!
You noticed as soon as I got home, that I look dangerous.
(Laughter)
I also almost killed myself
a dozen times.
I have been deported several times.
I love being deported, by the way, it’s free.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But, you have to be deported in the right direction!
(Laughter)
I tell you all this very briefly,
because stories, I would have to spend the night.
It’s to make you understand how I did my universities, okay?
You’re going to ask me why I did it all.
Me too, I asked myself the question.
It’s not a normal life.
The real real reasons, actually,
appeared after a dozen years.
At first, I had the dream.
Yes, many have the dream of seeing the world,
but we do not keep a life on a dream.
Then there is an insatiable curiosity about me.
At 17 years old like today at 79, the same!
But the real real reasons came after a dozen years,
because I was born before the war.
Hey, for the youngest, it’s the second. Thank you !
I see who calculate.
(Laughter)
I say that because the childhood memories for each of us is very strong.
It’s like an indoor backpack that you carry with you all your life.
And me, that was my first memories of life
because there was war, but not on TV.
We did not have the TV, but we had the Boches.
I remember that as a child, I had a recurring dream, a nightmare.
I saw myself in front of a platoon of the Gestapo shooting me.
It started strong.
I spent a night standing next to Villeneuve-St-Georges
when they bombed the yard, you see.
And today after 70 years,
when I hear the alarm that we try at the town hall
in Boussy-Saint-Antoine where I live,
the first thing there is, I have a twinge in my heart,
and my first reflex, even today, is to run in the cellar
because that noise, for me, announces the bombing.
So what I did was not a “world tour”
the classic world tour today: a year, a circle.
No, that’s not it, look at the map, it zigzags in all directions.
What I did, I prefer to call it a “men’s tour”.
What interested me is not the mileage that is there too,
nor adventure – I do not seek adventure,
but she seeks me and I do not miss –
what interested me was the heart of the man.
I wanted to meet men from all over the world
to know an essential question, following my childhood in the war:
will one day be able to establish peace?
That’s the essential question.
Want to know the answer?
(Public) Yes!
Are you sitting right there?
(Laughter)
For me, peace – it may surprise you what I’m going to say there –
it is not only possible,
it is inevitable.
Peace will happen, that’s what I just said.
I will join you right away because there are some who tell me:
“He did not see the world, him. If that’s exactly what I did!
It is difficult to imagine peace, since we never had it.
We can not imagine what we have never known.
When we look at the past of History, the bloody past,
it’s hard to imagine peace in there, we agree.
There are some who tell me, we always had the war,
then a brilliant conclusion, we will always have war.
Well, they do not look.
Look at Europe, it’s just a series of battles,
of wars, including two world, that’s what I learned.
Yet, there are thirty nations that have succeeded in establishing peace.
We have an example, we can see that it is not impossible.
But for it to be global, of course, there is a lot to fix.
Yes, another idea too,
you have already seen in the countryside, on brambles, caterpillars?
Yuck! It’s full of hair, full of legs, big eyes!
How to imagine the beautiful butterfly that is in there if we did not know?
Impossible !
What we have seen up to that date, in my opinion, is the “caterpillar” period.
I confess with you that it’s almost impossible
to imagine the beautiful butterfly of peace that is in it.
But I say, “If there is a caterpillar, there is a butterfly. “
There is one thing that has just upset the history of men, recently –
It’s new, it just came out –
there is no distance.
Pouf! For the first time in his life,
the great human family is connected, united, interdependent.
We are all in the same boat all of a sudden.
It will have to be taken into account, simply.
Whether the nations love each other or not, whether they want it or not,
they must be in tune –
we’re not going back to the Middle Ages on the back of a donkey, that’s it.
To establish a world of peace, it will be necessary to start with oneself.
It will take a man of peace, there is a logic in there.
And to have a man of peace, in my opinion, there are three steps to take.
You have to start with yourself, because everyone wants that to change,
provided that the others change.
I think you have to pick something.
It is very simple.
it is necessary to think that the Earth, in fact, is only one country.
“The Earth is only one country” is the title of my first book.
The Earth is only one country and all men are its citizens, that’s it.
Second thing, we must think that there is only one human species.
In any case, I only saw one. There are wonderful people everywhere.
We all have a heart and feelings.
We all live between two opposite poles: joy and pain.
Pouf! We are all in the middle.
We must also pick another trick
if we want peace to settle, stay and last.
It is that there are not 36 religions.
No, there is only one!
I would still like to say a word.
The word “religion” is a very sensitive word,
So I would like to specify what I mean by that.
For me, what is religion?
It’s a code of conduct that has been explained to us
by the great educators of humanity or the founders of civilizations.
Why did they explain that to us?
To develop our potential for quality and virtue that we have at the beginning,
to live in society in harmony,
and for those who want to believe in it, prepare for the next world.
It’s a code of conduct and that’s what we need to understand:
it’s the same book for everyone since the beginning.
There is only one book, stop fighting!
But this unique book, like any book, has many chapters.
Why ?
Because humanity is not static but constantly growing,
a new chapter is added regularly
for new understanding and new needs.
But it’s the same book.
In other words, the essence of religions is common.
If everyone turned to their cultural or religious heritage,
there would be no more stories.
I think it’s important – and I emphasize that a little bit –
to understand that there is only one. Let’s stop fighting.
I will take one last picture to make me understand, to be brief.
You know, when you want to build a new house,
what are we doing ?
We will search for new bricks.
We will not make the new house with old rotten bricks.
But a pile of new bricks is just a pile of new bricks.
It does not make a home. It is necessary, before, the plan of the architect.
Once you have the plan and the new materials,
we can build the house, we agree.
So today, it will take this man with the universal spirit
which one needs, and also a plan.
There is no existing system in the world today,
which corresponds to the need of the day.
I tell you that the big horn has started again recently.
Tonight, there was something on TV, the big puppet.
What I want to tell you – and I’ll finish on that –
you will not believe what I am going to say,
but it is because peace is not a wish on my part, a utopia.
She is running. That’s what I saw!
Glory today is not for one who loves his country,
but for the one who loves the whole world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Please follow and like us: