My surname, ALLAL, is clearly Middle Eastern in origin. My mother is French and Catholic; my father was born in Algeria. His mother is a tall young blonde woman from northern France who came to Algeria in search of the exotic… His father, the grandson of exiled Russian nobles, comes from a small village on the edge of the desert. His paternal family includes Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Few people know that religions become divisive only when states condemn them to play a political role. In the villages, Christians, Jews and Muslims marry one another because it poses no problem. All that matters is the wealth, land and livestock brought together by the new union. Religion is simply a tradition that bothers no one, until the Crémieux Decree… which will divide Muslims and Jews.
So I have many nationalities in my blood, and my family has embraced all three monotheistic religions. My mother raised me in the Catholic tradition; from my father’s parents I inherit a mixture of Islam and Judaism, while my father himself has little interest in religion.
Consequently, although I advocate absolute freedom of conscience and everyone’s right to live their own spiritual life, I am an atheist, a believer in the Republic, and a secular humanist.
I was born in Germany because my father was stationed there in the military. I am brought up strictly, in a family where children have no right to speak… or to much else.
Common enough at the time, this ‘dry’, frustrating childhood made me want, from a very early age, to act, to do, to undertake things, to go fast and far.
My grandmother, amused that I am born in Germany, gives me a Germanic name: Aldrick. An act that sums up the life of a woman who adapts and innovates against all opposition…
My grandfather, furious that I am born in the country that captured, tortured and murdered his father, will hold it against me all his life. It is hard to forgive a people for the death of your dad…
I reject this narrowness of mind, but I understand.
That vengeful grandfather has since died. The hope of true European harmony has driven out the hatred. Long live Europe!
In my family, you have to fight to exist; that is fortunate for a determined character like mine, but harder for those who expect tenderness and kindness from their family…
The only escape from this dreary childhood: the Scouts de France and track and field; adventure, resourcefulness, and physical and psychological commitment. Training in the rain or cold, as well as competing, gave me a great deal: a taste for effort, confidence in myself, and the pleasure of surpassing myself. The speed of a 100-meter sprint, throwing a discus and the high jump channeled and directed my energy, as well as my sorrows…
When people ask me what I do ‘in life’, I always find it very difficult to answer. We identify people, all too simply, by their occupation, and form an idea of them according to our own prejudices.
Let us be simple and direct: I started with nothing. I received financial aid in high school and at university, where I earned my M2 (DEA), a research master’s degree. I taught for 15 years while also building one of France’s largest private education groups (from 2000 onward), acquired and managed a 40,000 m² property portfolio, founded an auction house, ran a bookshop for three years (I own more than 50,000 books), created and ran a restaurant with a performance space for two years, directed plays, created a foundation that rescues and redistributes books; I love good food, am athletic, a parachutist and a private pilot, returned to study for a PhD at the Sorbonne in 2026, and am 300% committed to my latest creation: wattwings.co, a start-up placing AI at the heart of cockpits.
It is not easy to tell it all; my freedom disconcerts people…
To ‘explain’ this path, you need to know that action is my reason for being. Movement is life! A day is long. Even if you subtract seven hours of sleep and meals, which for a French person are key moments in the day, there are still 15 full hours left for imagination and action. Even allowing for vacations, during which the mind remains active nonetheless, we all have more than 5,000 hours a year to live, to act! As for me, I have spent more than 140,000 hours taking action! By comparison, that is almost 90 years of full-time work (in France).
Doing what I do may be unusual, but it is fairly logical. Anyone can do it; you obviously need to avoid spending your time in front of the television or a screen. Even reading is an essential part of my action: when I read, my mind races in every direction…
I love change, new departures, revolutions and success, and, with Fernando Pessoa, I maintain that ‘To be only one is a prison.’
Finally, creating is a need whose frustration makes me anxious. And so my mind, fleeing monotony, keeps offering the simple biped that I am an inexhaustible galaxy of ideas…
The summers of my childhood are all the same. We go to the Tarn to be bored to death. So I lend a hand to Alain, the hamlet’s farmer. I discover perseverance, the endless need to begin again, raw physical strength, muscle put to work for nature and life. I take an active part in the summer farm work. Thanks to my excellent physical condition, I take enormous satisfaction in hurling thousands of hay bales as high as possible onto a trailer that inexorably speeds up as soon as I find a steady rhythm…
This is my first ‘paid job’… paid in a fortifying soup with an incomparable flavor in the evening, around a table silenced by fatigue, but above all by the wonderful feeling of being useful; even if, at five in the morning, the irritable summons of the tractor’s horn seemed truly brutal…
In 1993, I earn my BAFA youth activity leader’s certificate, complete my PMP military parachute preparation course, pass the baccalauréat, and sell magazines through OFUP in high schools and universities. I have to fend for myself and support myself without help. Even if I pay a high price for it, my freedom is total!
From 1993 to 1996, I work as a youth activity leader: I welcome the children in the morning, supervise lunch at noon and homework in the evening, and run activities every Wednesday and during school vacations. I work so many hours that I become one of the highest-paid activity leaders in my village.
In 1996, at 21, I begin teaching: the passion seizes me with force. What a joy to help every student succeed! What immense satisfaction to be ‘the best teacher’! And yet I have never worked so hard.
In 1998, I teach 31.5 classroom hours a week across more than 15 different subjects, sleeping four hours a night for months; and yet I have never felt so fit!
In 2000, at 25, I create my first school, Cours Diderot, ex nihilo, with just 2,000 euros (13,000 francs). I teach there, clean it on Sundays, and work there from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day, weekends included.
I open a second, then a third; I systematically buy the properties, convincing the banks that the rent will be cheaper…
In 2020, across 17 campuses, my group employs 400 people. Every year, we educate thousands of school and university students.
In total, more than 50,000 students have studied at our schools. What a source of pride!
A dreadful middle school, where boredom vies with the insolence of a pupil named Aldrick who cannot sit still.
The entrance examination for military high school, to become a fighter pilot: a motivation, a success. But nearsightedness thwarts my ambition; I must resign myself to abandoning a plan that has lived within me for a very long time.
This is my first ‘formative failure’; the first to teach me a lesson; the lesson no one escapes: some battles are pointless; one must be stoic or fatalistic. What is happening to me may be unfair, but that is how it is; I must accept my fate. I will therefore be stoic because I accept the pain, and fatalistic because I resign myself to circumstances beyond my control.
With my science baccalauréat (Bac C) in hand, I go off to study philosophy at university, much to the dismay of my teachers, who had pictured me in Math Sup, the advanced mathematics preparatory course…
Thanks to a merit scholarship, I complete my bachelor’s degree in the United States. I teach there for up to 20 hours a week; a passion is born: teaching to change the world.
Having earned my master’s degree in Moral and Political Philosophy, I can finally devote myself entirely to teaching.
Putting logic and rigor at the service of thought still appeals to me today. Scientific rigor alone makes it possible to escape intellectual ostracism.
Indeed, in 2026, I decide to return to my studies and begin a PhD in literature and medicine at the Sorbonne. To read, discover, understand and learn are more than action verbs; for me, they act as powerful stimulants, indispensable forces that drive my existence.
