During the Greek civil war, at the age of 12, he was sent to a boarding school in Paris, by Octave Merlier,[8] the head of the French Institute in Athens, because his mother had been condemned to death as a communist fighter.[9] He stayed in France for 23 years with his British wife Anne Hubbard, the daughter of a chief justice, whom he had married in Scotland in 1955,[10] with his two first children, Tatiana and Nicolas. He was expelled from the French University for his active participation as a Maoist in the French student revolt of May 1968.[11] Since 1958, Dimitri Kitsikis had traveled to the P.R. of China where he became a committed Maoist.[12] He was then promoted to associate and later to full professor, after being invited to Canada in 1970 by the University of Ottawa.