On the bookseller’s table, his book titled I don’t transit, layout, typography and cover images immediately catch the eye. The unusual sign of the publisher friend Chloé Pathé is eloquent: in Amerindian Anamosa means “you walk with me”. Specializing in the humanities and social sciences, this house has published 80 titles in six years, its authors are not unknown: Christophe Granger received the Prix Femina Essai in 2020. Since these are stories of wandering and circulation in multiple spaces, since they are sudden restarts of a life itinerary, the synopsis of this Prix Femina is in affinity with the themes of Céline Regnard: Joseph Kabris or the possibilities of a life 1780-1822 chronicles the trajectory and return to France, via Russia, of a sailor-whaler from Bordeaux who escaped from his original condition to become a warrior of the Pacific Islands, tattooed from head to toe.
Montpellier and Paris are the cities where Céline Regnard was trained, her parents are scientists who love literature and music. Violent Marseille, Crime, industrialization and society 1851-1914, is the title of the book of the Presses Universitaires de Rennes, taken from his thesis supervisor by Gérard Chastagnaret, discussed in 2006. Multiple roots, deep knowledge of the brutality of extreme situations, stays in Le Havre and in the United States – the Covid and the wars prevented her from reaching as far as Beirut – support her research. As for her teachers at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud, she fondly remembers Antoine Prost and Patrick Boucheron. An exceptional scholarship, a scholarship from the Institut Universitaire de France, the return to New York in the company of her two children – the eldest of hers is 17 years old – favored her stops. Her bedside readings were once crime novels – Simenon, Ellroy, Izzo and Mankell – now Georges Perec and Pierre Lemaître. For headlines she will re-read, she cites The taste of the archive by Arlette Farge as well as 209 rue Saint-Maur by Ruth Zylbermann which traces the present and past life of a tenth century buildingand arrondissement of Paris, from 1850 to the present.
“What noise are we going to make? »
For private reasons, Céline Regnard came to live in the Bouches-du-Rhône in 2001. The repository of the archive which determines her thesis was located in Aix, on the top floor of a staircase, rue Gaston de Saporta; a departmental records storekeeper who knew her about her had pointed out police reports that required her to decipher and analyze for long seasons. For her “conditions of uncertainty” – exhaustion, joy and giggles – she remembers 2006-2007 as a crucial year, her seasons as a history-geography teacher with the sixth and fourth classes of a middle school in the Bella di Maggio.
He is an outspoken, clear and sensitive person. Hardy, capable of considerable work. Telemme is his research laboratory, he is now deputy director of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme. Speaking of the dynamism and energy of the Aix campus, he evokes the atmosphere of emulation of an interdisciplinary seminar that he conceived and conducted for two years with Jérémie Foa, author at La Découverte de All Those Who Fall / Faces of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. With sociologists, geographers and anthropologists we tried to understand how ” ordinary people can live in extraordinary situations »: how to break the habitus indicated by Pierre Bourdieu, how to regain the middle ground often overlooked and unnoticed, what are the affiliations, genealogies and bifurcations that inform the course of a life?
Before her book dedicated to the transit of Syrians, Céline Regnard had published in 2013, in the company of a researcher with whom she dialogues daily, Stéphane Mourlane, Italian imprints, Marseille and its region. In 2019, a second four-hand work appeared, composed with Laurent Dornel The Chinese in the Great War. Arms in the service of France. What noise will we make ? it is also the title of a book of interviews with Arlette Farge.
