In 1949, Yves Rocard, the influential director of the physical laboratories at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), wrote: ‘The Hiroshima explosion produces physicists, the Ministry of National Education decrees does not.’Footnote 1 The post-Second World War French scientific world was marked, like many other Western ones, by the appearance of ‘big science’ and the birth of what can be called a ‘nuclear culture’.Footnote 2 Following this war-born, American mode of knowledge production, France's scientific field and its higher education system were reshaped by a steady growth in the scientific population, a development of large-scale projects and massive government funding.Footnote 3 The consequences for research training were tremendous, especially in physics: confronted with the apparition of a new regime of production of scientific facts, universities faced the necessary implementation of a new regime of production of scientific elites.Footnote 4 In France, the research training part of the higher education system spearheaded the universities’ massification. For instance, the number of students preparing a doctorat ès sciences increased dramatically: from sixty-four defences in 1944, the Faculties of Sciences reached 226 in 1955 and 832 in 1968. Whereas the number of doctorates was multiplied by thirteen, the overall student population of the science faculties was only multiplied by five during the same period, indicating the extent of change. This exponential growth occurred primarily in the field of physical sciences; 46 per cent of doctoral degrees in sciences were awarded for a thesis in physical sciences in 1944, 57 per cent in 1955, and 72 per cent in 1968.Footnote 5 Such a profound reconfiguration in the French academic field was thoroughly intertwined with an acceleration in the internationalization of science. During the interwar period French physicists, like the rest of the scientific world, were more or less confined in what Robert Fox called a ‘national turn’; during the Second World War, many leading scientists went to the United States as refugees or Free France members, notably Pierre Auger, Francis Perrin and Léon Brillouin.Footnote 6 After the war, these contacts proved themselves lasting and invaluable: they were unanimously seen as powerful levers to foster a much-needed catch-up effect. Relations with these émigrés profoundly shaped the rebuilding of scientific programmes and higher education. Young French physicists, especially, henceforth turned their eyes towards the US, the world's leader in science and technology. Many of those graduate students were sent to the other side of the Atlantic, in order to help re-establish an effective and competitive research system in France. For instance, Jean Brossel, who would become a leading physicist in quantum optics, spent three years at the University of Manchester, from 1945 to 1948, then another three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from 1948 to 1951, before coming back to the ENS, where he was instrumental in the foundation of the Laboratoire de spectroscopie hertzienne, as Alfred Kastler's right-hand man. The US strongly encouraged this circulation of scientists, seeing it as a way to promote not only its scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe, but also its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well. The Fulbright programme may be the most obvious example of this exploitation of scholars’ circulation to beat swords into ploughshares.Footnote 7
The international circulation of scientists was therefore a fundamental aspect of the reconstruction and reorganization of French higher education. It is undeniable that the circulation of ideas happened on a global scale for a very long time, through various intermediaries, for instance the large-scale spreading of scientific journals and the culture of scientific internationalism.Footnote 8 But it was only after 1945 that the circulation of individuals, and with them experimental practices and organizational methods, became critical in the world of physical sciences. No longer was international journeying the culmination of a handful of exceptional careers, free of laboratory servitude (e.g. Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin).Footnote 9 To put it in a nutshell, during the 1950s and 1960s a new type of transnational scientific elite emerged. Internationalism was no longer the prerogative of scientific celebrity, but an element of distinction, unusual but no longer exceptional.
This transformation was made possible by the creation of a series of new institutions and programmes, destined to facilitate and structure such circulations – as the state of the foreign-currency market (and national policies) made it disproportionately expensive for a European scholar to live in the US.Footnote 10 The purpose of this essay is to explore the history of what was surely one of the strongest elements of that social apparatus, and one of the most innovative: the first and most effective ‘crash course’ in theoretical physics, the Les Houches School of Theoretical Physics, a summer school founded by Cécile Morette in 1951, in a small alpine village. By doing so, I intend to plead for the importance of taking into account the various sociological and institutional conditions of possibility of science's transnationality – as they may be, paradoxically, local and contingent.
The birth of a school
The school was the brainchild of Cécile Morette (1922–2017), a young French theoretical physicist whose career path was early confronted with the challenges of science internationalization.Footnote 11 After graduating from the University of Caen with a licence ès sciences physiques (bachelor's degree) in 1943, and preparing a diplôme d’études supérieures (DES, master's degree) in Paris under the tutelage of Louis de Broglie in 1944, she was recruited in October 1944 as junior researcher of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) by its director, Frédéric Joliot. At that time, only 15 per cent of CNRS researchers in physics were women, and less than 10 per cent in theoretical physics.Footnote 12 While working on her doctorate, she was to act as ‘house theorist’ for his laboratory of nuclear chemistry at the Collège de France, helping the professor with his lectures and answering the letters sent by his more theory-oriented colleagues. This situation confronted her directly with the scientific chasm created between France and the rest of the physics world by the Nazi occupation and the idiosyncrasies of de Broglie's school of theoretical physics.Footnote 13 As Morette described in a 1995 interview,
Joliot asked me to read the Bohr and Wheeler paper, which he said was important. Joliot … recognized there was some importance there and wanted somebody to read it. And as a matter of fact, I think that was the point at which he decided to hire me as a theorist … and the first job was to read the Bohr and Wheeler paper.
But not having any quantum mechanics of anything … I couldn't make head or tail of it. And that's what started for me the whole process of telling Joliot, ‘I've got to speak to somebody. I have got to go [somewhere else] to see what's going on’.Footnote 14
An opportunity for such mobility arose at the recently founded Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), where the German refugee Walter Heitler succeeded another refugee, Erwin Schrödinger, as director of the School of Theoretical Physics in December 1945.Footnote 15 The new director intended to strengthen the DIAS's international recognition, strongly supported in this endeavour by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, who saw in the project a means to enhance Ireland's status and prestige.Footnote 16 Through his vast network of contacts, Heitler sent invitations to several major physicists, including Joliot, seeking suggestions for young scholars interested in joining the institute. Morette seized the opportunity: she spent the 1946–1947 academic year in Dublin, working on the creation of mesons in nucleon–nucleon collisions with Heitler, Hwan Wu Peng and Ning Hu.Footnote 17 She came back with the material for a doctoral thesis which she defended on 25 March 1947. But her return was to be temporary: with Joliot and de Broglie's joint benediction, she joined Niels Bohr at the Institutet för Teoretisk Fysik, in Copenhagen, as a Rask–Oersted fellow, from September 1947 to spring 1948. She then became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, for two years, invited by its director, Robert Oppenheimer, on the recommendation of Bohr and Heitler. During spring 1950, the French Ministry of National Education (through its Direction de l'enseignement supérieur), hoping to finally draw upon the international capital thus accumulated, and the scientific skills Morette had acquired abroad, let her know that a tenured position as maître de conférences awaited her at the University of Nancy, starting in September 1950.
But in the weeks that followed this professional proposition, the American physicist Bryce DeWitt, then a postdoc at the IAS, put forward another kind of proposal. While they were having supper after a day of canoeing, he asked for her hand in marriage. After a night of reflection, she accepted.
This meant that, unlike most of her French comrades who benefited from an early international training, and in accordance with the gendered norms of her time and class, Morette chose to stay abroad and pursued a career in the US: as she told Nicolas Constans in 2009, ‘in those times, wives followed their husbands’.Footnote 18 The couple managed to secure employment at the University of California at Berkeley in 1952, after a year as research associates at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. In 1956, they joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then, in 1972, the University of Texas at Austin.Footnote 19 This American career was, however, supplemented by a French career, allowing Cécile Morette to keep one foot on each side of the Atlantic Ocean. She remained on the CNRS rolls until 1965, before becoming professor at the University of Grenoble.
The birth of the Les Houches school was the major concrete consequence of this twofold international career. In order to contribute to the reconstruction of French research, and as a ‘self-imposed condition for marrying a foreigner’, Morette conceived the project of establishing a summer course.Footnote 20 The idea was to select a number of French and foreign professors and students who would be gathered for a short amount of time (ideally eight weeks), in an isolated place, in order to foster intense face-to-face interactions – deemed far more effective in knowledge circulation and science training than the deployment of what Latour later came to name ‘immutable mobiles’.Footnote 21 Two sources of inspiration can be detected: first, the Ann Arbor summer symposium that Morette attended in 1949, at the University of Michigan – which was, however, very different, as it was more formal and organized around only one professor, Richard Feynman; and second, her strongly committed membership of the Girl Scouts, which ended only with her departure to Ireland. If the Guides ethos was far from being science-oriented, its effectiveness for skills acquisition, sociability strengthening and network building was impressive.
The project came to fruition surprisingly quickly. Through a blitz campaign in several well-chosen Parisian offices during the 1950–1951 winter, Morette secured the support of major figures, as she ‘convinced the divas to sing in the rain’.Footnote 22 These included Pierre Auger, director of the Natural Sciences Department at UNESCO; Gaston Dupouy, director of CNRS; Albert Châtelet, dean of the Paris faculty of science; and above all Pierre Donzelot, directeur de l'enseignement supérieur and as such administrative head of the whole higher education infrastructure. All contributed their support, even if only by lending their name. Donzelot proved to be the most tangible supporter of Morette's project, as he funded the school with 3.5 million francs in 1951, then four million annually from 1952 to 1957.Footnote 23 Auger, who had far fewer financial resources at his disposal, opened his address book for her, and invited her to the Geneva conference of the Centre européen de la culture (12 December 1950), a crucial social meeting for the ‘fusion of the initiatives’ that led to the creation of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN).Footnote 24 Her project goals are clarified in a document, written in November 1950, for the CNRS:
Theoretical physics teaching is, in general, insufficient. In those conditions it would be advisable to provide to French and foreign students and junior researchers, during the summer, a basic education course allowing them to tackle the problems of modern theoretical physics. The courses, roughly of a couple months’ length, would be simultaneously simple, modern and intensive, with a syllabus designed to allow the less experienced to attend class profitably and the more experienced to be interested by a very new presentation of problems which they know only partially …
The summer period would allow us to benefit from the presence of foreign professors in France, who would accept to contribute to the school while enjoying a residence in a picturesque region. On another note, it would allow us to gather students who are far-flung, and still too few to justify the creation of several research centres.
Experience of schools of this kind in the United States shows their appeal, and the service they can provide to scientific research. Such a school in Europe would furthermore contribute, on a scientific level, to international cooperation and to French prestige.Footnote 25
With this project, Morette simultaneously addressed many concerns of those French scientific leaders. Auger and Dupouy (physicists), Donzelot (a physico-chemist) and many others of their peers felt that French science had been in a relatively mediocre state for at least the previous decade; only international cooperation was deemed to offer a way to emerge from this critical situation, and to catch up with the world leaders. But this operation had to be carried out with the least amount of new legislation possible in order to circumvent the inertia of the political circles of the Fourth Republic, to be accomplished at the lowest cost possible in order to ward off the Finance Ministry's wrath, and without any diplomatic commitment that might have been frowned upon by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a time of Cold War.Footnote 26 In their eyes, Morette's school was a low-cost, low-risk, high-reward way to ‘modernize’ French science, alongside much more ambitious and onerous endeavours, such as the difficult birth of the supranational laboratory that was to become CERN, the quinquennial plan of the CNRS, or the reorganization of the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA) after the eviction of its first high commissioner, the communist Joliot, on 28 April 1950. Best of all, the risk of creating a brain drain was limited within Morette's plan, as, within its terms, French students would stay in France.
The support of scientific leaders secured, a location remained to be found. Morette investigated several hotel establishments, trying to bring her school into being near one of the high-altitude laboratories, especially the ones devoted to cosmic rays at L'Argentières and the Aiguille du Midi. These were property of the Ecole polytechnique, and led by her friend Louis Leprince-Ringuet.Footnote 27 However, such an option proved to be too costly, and she feared that a hotel could not provide the desired socializing opportunities among participants, while subjecting them to too many distractions and external solicitations. The Ministry of Education offered to make the Briançon lycée available, but it was deemed not isolated enough.Footnote 28 Morette finally settled on several chalets (with no facilities) owned by the father of Arlette, her dearest friend from the Girl Scouts – the architect Albert Laprade, who, for the sake of friendship, offered a very cheap rent. The school was therefore founded in an old and rustic farm (Figure 1), surrounded by small mazots (traditional wooden shacks), in a forty-hectare property at the Côte des Chavants – immediately dubbed ‘Côte des Savants’– in front of Mont Blanc, four kilometres away from the alpine village of Les Houches.Footnote 29 The school was officially created on 18 April 1951, just one week before Cécile and Bryce married.
Figure 1. Discussions during the first session of the Les Houches school (1951). Archives de l'Ecole de physique théorique des Houches, reproduced by kind permission of the Ecole de physique des Houches.
Cécile Morette, theoretical physicist and entrepreneur extraordinaire
How could a twenty-nine-year-old woman manage to found such a school, within an academic system renowned for the weight of its administrative rules and hierarchical social structure?Footnote 30 This success can only be explained through a careful study of her biographical trajectory, highlighting the extremely uncommon combination of circumstances and social resources held and strategically mobilized by Cécile Morette.
First of all, one must bear in mind that Morette could be described, in a manner of speaking, as the adoptive daughter of the whole Corps des mines – the foremost technical grand corps of the French state, then all-male, characterized by its extremely strong elitism, esprit de corps and adherence to a Saint-Simonian ideal.Footnote 31 Born on 21 December 1922, within the very walls of the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines de Paris (ENSMP), a school that united her father and her mother's trajectories, she was born into a proximity with science and affiliation with the ruling classes of highest-level civil service and industry. Her apparent father, André Morette, polytechnicien (graduate of the Ecole polytechnique), son of a polytechnicien, chief engineer at the Corps des mines, was at the time temporary lecturer at his second alma mater.Footnote 32 His main post was professor of metallurgy at the Ecole des mines de Saint-Etienne, but in 1923 he asked for a leave of absence and became director general of the Société métallurgique de Normandie (SMN).Footnote 33 His wife, Marie-Louise Morette, née Ravaudet, daughter of the secretary of the ENSMP, was a licensed mathematics teacher, although she did not continue in this profession. After the death of André Morette in 1931, she married Maurice Payen, a civil engineer of mines and the successor of her late husband as director of the SMN. Bearing further testimony to the strength of the ties uniting the members of this social sphere, one may note that the two brothers of Cécile, Jacques and François, became inspecteurs des finances.Footnote 34 The episode of the Atlantic crossing of 1948, as narrated by Cécile Morette, gives an idea of the family atmosphere, and the strength of the Corps des mines network:
I came by ship, travelling first class, my stepfather having upgraded my CNRS travel allowance. He wanted to be sure that my travelling companions would meet his approval; he came on board the ship to choose my assigned table. It turned out to be a table of Dominican Fathers, but I was sick most of the time and hardly met them. As for meeting eligible young men, he had arranged for Bernard Gregory, then a graduate student at MIT [and a member of the Corps des mines], later to become directeur général of CERN, to look after me. He did. He came to Princeton to be my escort at the Institute's 1949 Spring Dance.Footnote 35
The allied bombing of Caen put a dramatic end to this bourgeois upbringing. On 6 June 1944 the twenty-two-year-old Cécile Morette brutally lost her mother, her grandmother, one of her sisters and the family housemaid. Such a tremendous biographical shock altered the course of her life and completely changed the use to which she put her educational capital. Instead of becoming an intellectual ornament as a wife to a brilliant Corps des mines engineer, in accordance with the expectations of her social milieu, she used her freshly acquired DES (28 April 1944) to launch a professional career. Reporter Emily Mitchell recorded Morette's recollections of this time in the year 2000:
After high school … her mother suggested she study mathematics in college – treating it, DeWitt-Morette says, like a finishing school, ‘for cultural purposes and logical thinking’ … She was in the midst of an exam in Paris when tragedy struck … ‘I now felt in charge of my family’, she says, ‘so I thought I had better get a job’. At 22, she no longer felt young.Footnote 36
The mathematician Maurice Janet, her professor at the University of Caen, who had just been appointed to the Sorbonne, recommended that she present herself to Joliot, as he knew that the physicist of the Collège de France was looking for a ‘house theorist’. Her acceptance precipitated a rather abrupt change of environment: the young bourgeois woman, Catholic and theory-driven, was introduced to a laboratory where communists and experimenters were in clear majority.
This incongruity, it seems, honed Morette's skills as a scientific diplomat. Her combination of class and gender, her simultaneously feminine and grand bourgeois social dispositions, proved to be especially effective for resource gathering and institution building, as it was characterized by strong self-control, discreet confidence and mastery of social etiquette.Footnote 37 Without delving too much in counterfactual history, it is very likely that it was the loss of almost all her family that caused her to deviate from a trajectory close to that of the equally well-bred Laura Fermi or Ava Helen Pauling, for example, socialite wives of high-profile scientists who played major roles as go-betweens in the international physics community – without maintaining a professional career of their own.Footnote 38 In a word, the tact and diplomacy instilled in a quasi-Proustian jeune fille made Morette a master tactician in the academic world, allowing her to cross the political boundaries that shaped the first years of the Cold War. As Mitchell wrote, paraphrasing Morette herself,
Cécile knows exactly when to complain, when to demand, when to agree, and how to express any of these actions, in speech or in writing … To gain support from male colleagues for Les Houches, DeWitt-Morette made them think the proposal was their own. She would describe the plan to them and then phone a week later to say, ‘Oh, that idea you told me about was great!’ Remembering those days now, she says with a laugh, ‘I was an intellectual geisha!’Footnote 39
Those interpersonal skills and discreet leadership would be nothing without Cécile Morette's obstinacy, and her ability to get her foot in the door with a smile. Pierre Auger, strongly impressed by her forcefulness, blurted, ‘elle emmerdera la terre entière, mais elle l'aura!’Footnote 40 Her persistence was reinforced by a strong sense of duty inherited from her upbringing, intertwined with deep-rooted patriotism:
Bryce DeWitt proposed to her. Her first reaction? That same evening, she refused. There was no question of moving to the United States for someone who felt as indebted to her country … Yet, she would like to marry Bryce. The next morning, she found a solution in a matter of minutes, while brushing her teeth. This solution was the Les Houches school.Footnote 41
With such dispositions, not only was Morette able to gather the support of the major institutional luminaries of science, such as Auger, Donzelot, Dupouy or Châtelet, but she also benefited from an active propaganda effort initiated by older and more powerful professors. Yves Rocard at the ENS widely circulated the newsletter of the school through the paper ENS physique, and sent his most promising students to the summer school, as did Louis Leprince-Ringuet of the Ecole polytechnique. Francis Perrin, at the Collège de France and the CEA, provided some office space to install a Parisian secretariat for the school.Footnote 42 Louis de Broglie and Alexandre Proca, at the Institut Henri Poincaré, lobbied actively, especially in CNRS circles, to ensure that young researchers would be aware of the endeavour and be encouraged to go. Louis Néel was instrumental in obtaining for the Les Houches school the patronage of the Grenoble faculty of sciences, allowing the school to be, legally, an institute of the University of Grenoble. In doing so, he secured its institutional existence, academic legitimacy and freedom of action, as the university was a far more distant master than the faculty of sciences would have been.Footnote 43 The fact that Morette managed to align such rivals can only be explained by her interpersonal skills, supported by the dual patronage of Louis de Broglie and Frédéric Joliot, two powerful academics on opposite sides of the French academic field – the first was a right-wing aristocrat, university professor and theoretician, while the latter was a communist from humble origins, a professor at the Collège de France, and an experimentalist. If those two universally respected physicists were nevertheless institutionally marginalized after 1950, Morette built an extended network on their support. She succeeded in enrolling men as politically diverse as Dupouy, socialist of the southern type (and close friend of the president Vincent Auriol), the old-school intellectual socialists Auger and Perrin (inheritors of the dreyfusard generation of Perrin père), the even older-school radical Châtelet, the Catholic and conservative Leprince-Ringuet, the staunchly apolitical Néel, and the unclassifiable ‘anarcho-Gaullist’ Rocard. Morette was therefore in a position to bring together the various barons of the higher education and research world, in France as in the rest of the world.
Furthermore, as British nurses were common in her milieu during the interwar years, Morette perfectly mastered the English language, a powerful tool in a then largely monolingual French academic landscape. Combined with her internationalized trajectory, her linguistic skills allowed her to play the role of a go-between, connecting separate networks and gathering symbolic, social and economic resources at both international and national levels. For example, in the November 1950 project, Morette openly supplemented the appeal to national interest with the evocation of the support of Oppenheimer; Enrico Fermi, professor at Chicago University and Nobel Prize-winner of 1938; Julian Schwinger, professor at Harvard; and Victor Weisskopf, professor at MIT. In this way, she combined the national institutional legitimacy acquired in various bureaucratic, academic and political spaces with the international scientific legitimacy provided by such renowned physicists.Footnote 44
The effects of Morette's social dispositions were compounded by her impressive social capital, exceeding by far the boundaries of the academic field, acquired through the Corps des mines and various Catholic networks, the Girl Scouts being only the most prominent. She wrote articles of science popularization for the Dominican review La vie intellectuelle, an example of her reach beyond the specialist sphere. Her correspondence shows that she was personally close to people as diverse as Jean Gommy, president of the board of directors of the Société des hôtels de montagne; the high-flying diplomat François de Rose, directly involved in the creation of CERN, who gave crucial advice on which institution to approach; the captain of industry and science lover Léon Motchane; and of course Albert Laprade himself.Footnote 45 Furthermore, one can make the hypothesis that this Catholic grounding helped her, combined of course with her marriage, to reassure many American interlocutors and to convince them of the innocuousness of her project, as the US was then wary of the Parti communiste's strength and tried to stifle France's nuclear ambition.Footnote 46
The ‘heroic years’
Thanks to her exceptional trajectory and her specific social dispositions, Morette became an effective academic entrepreneur, gathering funding and finding premises in a matter of months, and attracting for the first session, in July–August 1951, a wide array of scientists. Each session was intended to review the state of knowledge in a precise area of physics, by means of a strongly internationalized teaching (and student) body (Table 1). From the first session, several well-established young professors attended, the oldest being fifty years old. It was by no means Morette's least feat to have got the support of the oldest, most powerful professors, while managing to prevent their direct interference. On the French side, one can cite Pierre Grivet, Alfred Kastler and Théo Kahan as young professors in attendance; for the other scientists, we could underline the presence of, naturally, Walter Heitler, then at Zurich; Léon van Hove, from the Université libre de Bruxelles; Emilio Segrè, from Berkeley; Walter Kohn, of the Carnegie Institute of Technology; and the Nobel Prize-winner of 1945 Wolfgang Pauli, from Zurich – and, for a few days only, his 1938 confrère, Enrico Fermi. These endorsements provided an impressive start-up: the first session attracted two hundred applicants, for only thirty-five student positions.Footnote 47
Table 1. Country of origin of the attendees of the Les Houches summer school (1951–1967).
Source: Université de Grenoble, Ecole d’été de physique théorique. Les Houches. Rapport d'activités 1951–1966, 1967.
Instrumental in the pedagogical efficiency of the school was the fact that it was what Muriel Darmon would call an ‘enveloping institution’, in the sense that it had some (but not all) characteristics of a Goffmanian ‘total institution’. It was both a place of work and a residence for a number of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community, ‘leading an enclosed round of life’. The major differences were, of course, that the timescale was far shorter and the administrative coercion far lighter than in most classic examples of such institutions, such as mental hospitals and boarding schools.Footnote 48 At Les Houches the attendees were nearly cut off from the outside world, with the bare minimum in amenities before the early 1960s (especially for students). The classes took place in the morning, mostly in English, at the rate of two classes every day, six days a week; some non-recurring seminars were organized, for professors who could not stay the whole session. The afternoon was left free, dedicated to face-to-face discussions between professors and students trying to understand what had been said in the morning, often while mountaineering. The lectures, systematically prepared and written in advance, were widely circulated as proceedings after the session.Footnote 49 The certificate awarded by the school to those who requested it was marked by this demanding conviviality. For the first part of the examination, the student had to choose one question among four, determined by the whole teaching body; they had to answer it within two days, using the little school library, every document available and every discussion they might have had. The second part of the examination comprised a verbal discussion of an hour or two, with one of the professors.Footnote 50
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, a student in 1955, recalled in 2001,
It was extremely spartan … We were lodged in small wooden chalets, barely furnished. The classroom was an old chalet slightly below. We sat on canvas chairs, the chalkboard was primitive, discussions happened outside, on the pastures. It was rough, but at the same time very charming, very bonne franquette, an extremely pleasant atmosphere.Footnote 51
This atmosphere of scientific camaraderie and emulation was extremely effective, generating a powerful sense of belonging, almost an esprit de corps.Footnote 52 From this point of view, we could compare the Les Houches school to the ‘hot spots and hot moments’ in scientific collaborations studied by John N. Parker and Edward J. Hackett: as the two sociologists underline, brief but intense periods of collaboration undertaken in isolated settings facilitate the rapid production of highly creative science and help overcome scepticism by outsiders.Footnote 53 By generating a coherent social group, oriented toward common intellectual goals, the pedagogical efficiency of direct intellectual exchange can be multiplied – especially when what is at stake is the transmission of ways of thinking, and of tacit knowledge.Footnote 54 According to Philippe Nozière, a student in 1953 before becoming deputy director of the school after his doctoral studies at Princeton, ‘we learned in two months what we would have learned in two years in an American university’.Footnote 55 Furthermore, the internationalism flourishing in this endeavour fed on itself, by giving young researchers a leg-up to access the world stage. The polytechnicien (and Corps des mines engineer) Cyrano de Dominicis, for example, participated as a student in 1953; at Les Houches, he met Rudolf Peierls, who convinced him to undertake a doctorate under his supervision, at the University of Birmingham, from 1954 to 1957.
Enrolment was highly selective: the number of applications constantly exceeded by more than three times the number of available student places. The selection was operated by a select committee (de facto mainly by Morette) on the basis of recommendations, courses taken, personal work completed – diplomas being only one of a number of elements.Footnote 56 Nevertheless, between 1951 and 1967, among the 250 French students, seventy-three (nearly 30 per cent) were students of the ENS, a grande école characterized by its intensive research training. Among the non-normaliens and non-polytechniciens, the majority were entry-level CNRS researchers already holding a doctorate, and sometimes physicists even more advanced in their career. The best example was Anatole Abragam, who taught at the school in 1955, 1961 and 1964, but decided to come back in 1965 as a 50-year-old student, in order to follow a special course dedicated to the theory of elementary particles directed towards experimenters. Abragam had recently been entrusted to direct the whole department of physics at the Saclay Centre d’études nucléaires (the main research complex of the CEA), but did not know particle physics as well as he would have liked; he felt that Les Houches was the most effective way to quickly and accurately get a grasp on the science he would be directing.Footnote 57 This selectivity of the school's recruitment was not reserved to French students; among the forty-one American students, no less than fifteen came from an Ivy League university, and among the twenty-two British students, nine were from Cambridge University – and, like Abragam, Bryce DeWitt himself, a teacher at Les Houches in 1953, 1956 and 1963, came as a student in 1958.
This selectivity ensured the school's attractiveness for the professors themselves, even if their stipend remained modest. One can quote Léon Rosenfeld, a Belgian physicist then professor at the University of Manchester who, back home after the second session, wrote in a letter to Morette,
Yesterday afternoon, several students submitted me to so close an examination with their questions about my lectures that my departure has been somewhat precipitated, as time went by much faster than I would have thought … I rarely worked in such a sympathetic atmosphere, and moreover I rarely provided such intense intellectual work without feeling any fatigue; on the contrary, I found at Les Houches both the stimulation of an elite audience and the tranquillity necessary for the concentration on a given subject.Footnote 58
Consequently, attending Les Houches was correlated with subsequent career success for its students and staff, especially during the first part of its existence. Of ninety-three different professors attending between 1951 and 1961, twenty-one were or became Nobel Prize-winners, and among 346 students during the same period, three obtained the same prize, and fifteen became members of the Académie des sciences. In France, the shortcomings of the university curricula that justified the creation of the school were mitigated as its alumni became fully fledged academics: as early as 1963, of the ninety-three French students of the 1951–1957 sessions, at least twenty-two were already maîtres de conférences, and nine full professors.Footnote 59 Thus, at that time, fifteen out of the eighteen French universities had at least one permanent teacher who had benefited from at least one summer school session (the only exceptions being Dijon, Nancy and Poitiers).Footnote 60 This fact led to a change in pedagogical policy: while the first sessions (Table 2) were focused on teaching the main aspects of quantum theory (very broadly understood, as it encompassed field theory, nuclear physics and condensed-matter physics), after 1958 the school diversified its activities, setting more specialized sessions.
Table 2. Subjects at the Les Houches summer school sessions (1951–1967).
Source: Université de Grenoble, Ecole d’été de physique théorique, Les Houches, Rapport d'activités 1951–1966, 1967.
Such success, evident from the outset, quickly attracted new financial backers.Footnote 61 Among the major sources of support, we can cite the CEA, from as early as 1952; the Fulbright programme from 1953 (this reserved two scholarships each year to finance the presence of American lecturers); the Ford Foundation from 1956; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from 1959.Footnote 62 Other institutions helped fund the attendance of their nationals, such as the Belgian Institut interuniversitaire des sciences nucléaires, the Swedish Statens råd för atomforskning, and the Norwegian Norges almenvitenskapelige forskningsråd. With regard to these funders, the school seems to have maintained a policy of independence: physicists hailing from the Eastern Bloc, if never great in number, were nevertheless always present from the second session onwards. Students from Yugoslavia attended from 1952 onwards, from Poland beginning in 1956, from Hungary beginning in 1957, from Romania beginning in 1958, and from the USSR beginning in 1961. Professors from the Soviet Union taught at the school from 1958 onwards, starting with Spartak Belyaev and Vilen Strutinsky. With this kind of support the school quickly expanded and institutionalized, while remaining nearly cost-free for students. The management of the school became so demanding that Cécile Morette was forced to recruit deputies, first Jean-François Detoeuf, then Philippe Nozières, before it became too hard for her to continue leading across the Atlantic Ocean: Roger Balian succeeded her as head of the school in 1972.
This institutional growth can be retraced locally, via the physical growth of the school. Morette bought the chalet called ‘Le Chardonnet’ in April 1955 as a permanent dwelling. The school still had to lease several chalets, but its continuation was now much more assured. In October 1960 the site's biggest chalet, ‘Les Balmes’, was purchased and turned into a restaurant, while a smaller one, ‘La Chavanne’, was acquired to increase the number of lodgings, along with the storehouses ‘du Rocher’ and ‘de Babette’. In 1961 and 1964, the school bought several plots of land, in order to fill the gaps; the institution was no longer a tenant, but an owner. The most important building, ‘La Jacassière’, providing a classroom, some study rooms, a library and some offices, was built on this land from 1961, and inaugurated for use in March 1965.Footnote 63 This building symbolized a new school, with a degree of comfort, departing from the ‘boy scout camp’ flavour of what Morette called the ‘heroic years’.Footnote 64 Such an upgrade was made inevitable for two reasons: with the sessions’ specialization, the school recruited more advanced students, with families in tow. Moreover, the birth of competing and more luxurious summer schools threatened Les Houches's ability to attract the most outstanding professors, especially as it offered only a modest remuneration.Footnote 65
Spin-offs
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Les Houches School of Physics had a considerable impact on the development of top-level physics in France and Europe. Beyond the individual achievements of its alumni, what is especially striking is the rapid proliferation of similar endeavours, evidence of Morette's success. As early as 1953, the Milanese professor Giovanni Polvani, with the strong support of Giampetro Puppi, Enrico Fermi and the Società italiana di fisica, founded the Scuola internazionale di fisica, in Varenna, Italy, whose main purpose was to be an experimental counterpart to the Les Houches school and its strongly theoretical mindset.Footnote 66 In July 1958, another summer school in theoretical physics was created in Cargèse, Corsica, by Maurice Lévy and Yves Rocard. Openly designed as a ‘Les Houches on the beach’, this Cargèse school was for quite a long time as rustic and isolated as its Alpine counterpart, maybe even more so; the idea hatched when Lévy, teaching at Les Houches in 1957, considered ‘too irrepressible the temptations to escape to Chamonix’.Footnote 67
What really kick-started the generalization of the summer school model was the creation of the advanced-study institute programme by NATO in 1958, initiated by the former Les Houches professor Norman F. Ramsey.Footnote 68 After the 1957 ‘sputnik shock’, NATO was looking for a way to accelerate and shape the reconstruction of European physics, in order to secure the cooperation of often reluctant allies and produce a scientific order consonant with American ideals and foreign-policy objectives.Footnote 69 In that respect, drawing openly on ‘the highly successful summer institutes at Les Houches and Varenna’, the Science Committee dedicated significant amounts of money to help the existing schools and prompt the creation of new ones. Ramsey, speaking as science adviser of the North Atlantic Council, ‘considered this to be one of the most profitable ways of spending … money’.Footnote 70 During its first year of existence, with a starting budget of $150,000, this programme helped finance the Les Houches and Varenna schools – who kept their institutional independence – and created ‘advanced study institutes’ in Naples (Italy), Kjeller (Norway) and Corfu (Greece) – all of them focusing on physics. Thus the Les Houches model was internationalized, and (re)built the foundations of a European community of physicists (Table 3). For the second year, sixteen applications were received for new summer schools, coming from disciplines such as biology, biochemistry and astronomy, though physics still prevailed. If the classification of many crucial Science Committee archives prevents historians from going further in the analysis for now, there is every reason to believe that this programme was instrumental in the diffusion of the summer school model to other disciplines.Footnote 71
Table 3. Nationalities of professors and students in the first wave of NATO advanced study institutes (1959).
‘Science Committee. NATO advanced study institute programme. Note by the secretary’, 30 November 1959, NAOR, AC/137-D/52. There is no record concerning the nationality of students at Varenna.
The strongest evidence of the success of the Les Houches model may not lie so much in its replication through the NATO programme as in its reappropriation by its adversaries. Despite the strong professional and personal links uniting Cécile Morette and the Joliot–Curie couple, Morette's school suffered collateral damage during the spirited campaign led by the French Communist Party, in 1953, against the CERN project.Footnote 72 The communists produced and widely disseminated an eighty-page anonymous pamphlet, Un plan USA de mainmise sur la science (The American Annexation of Science), accusing the United States of ‘using and organizing, with maximum efficiency, international science to profit American policy’.Footnote 73 Though the text recognized that ‘the quality of the [Les Houches] school is indisputable’, suspicion of scientific espionage remained strong, as the US Department of State had recently nominated a dozen scientific attachés in the American embassies in Europe.Footnote 74
The links uniting this school and the European atomic pool (CERN), the participation of the American scientific attaché [Jeffries Wyman], and other signs of this kind, reveal this institution as being integrated in an attempt to create, in parallel with the national education system … an education under the American influence. This is said without forgetting the possibility, induced by the American scientific attaché’s presence, to enrich the files of the Department of State concerning the state of research, and the very personalities of the researchers.Footnote 75
The reaction of the French communist scientists and their allies went beyond rhetoric: it took the shape of a ‘counterschool’ project, launched in Nice by Moïse Haïssinsky in September 1953: the Centre international de chimie physique et de ses applications. This respected radiochemist, working at the Institut du radium, explained the stakes of his project in a letter to his colleague Marcel Prettre, professor at the University of Lyons:
While on vacation in Nice … I had the idea that it would be useful to create in Nice, during holidays, an upgrading course in physical chemistry, similar to the Ouches [sic] one for nuclear physics [sic]; that one is strongly Americanized, but the Nice one, I hope, would be very French, with the participation of physico-chemist and foreign auditors … I talk about it with [Georges] Champetier and [René] Wurmser: they agreed, and agreed too that the organization of teaching should be done by ‘beardless’ physico-chemists … I think we should plan for a patronage committee, where we could put the ‘bearded’ people – provided that their facial hair is not too long.Footnote 76
The spelling error on its own is revealing: everything suggests that Haïssinsky's knowledge of the school was in fact superficial at best. Marcel Prettre was nevertheless enthusiastic, and the details were established during a meeting of the Société de chimie physique, on 27 October 1953, between Haïssinsky, Prettre, Wurmser, Champetier and Bernard Pullman, with the help of a Nice resident, Marcel Devienne, a chemist strongly involved in the local section of the centre left Parti radical. During the next months, Haïssinsky managed to recruit many other colleagues of the same age group to the organization committee (e.g. Yvette Cauchois and René Audubert), and to the patronage committee some prestigious professors: Louis de Broglie, Irène Joliot-Curie, Edmond Bauer for the French, and Charles Ingold, George de Hevesy, Francesco Giordani and Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer from the international community.Footnote 77 Haïssinsky, as a former student of Marie Curie and a middle-aged man (he was born in 1898), held a social capital comparable in size with Morette's network of allies. The major difference was that the Ukraine-born Haïssinsky's network of relationships was, in France, pretty much limited to the scientific world. Whereas Morette had managed to find a place quickly, the various approaches attempted by Haïssinsky and Devienne to enrol the help of the Nice mayor Jean Médecin, the Principality of Monaco, or the perfumiers of Grasse, elicited many fine words and promises, but no substantial results.Footnote 78 As a consequence, the first session, intended to focus on theoretical chemistry and chemical kinetics, planned for summer 1954, had to be cancelled – and the whole project aborted.
This failure is revealing of the power and the prestige so quickly acquired by the Les Houches school. The idea that it should be imitated was widely shared during the Cold War, even across political borders. Yet for the first international school to succeed, the role of Morette's social dispositions and positions, and her ability to diversify her network of allies – going so far as to strike a deal with what appeared to many of her colleagues as the very Devil himself, NATO – were utterly crucial.
Conclusion
The impact of Cécile Morette's transnational creation on French and European physics was tremendous. Relying on the exceptional social attributes of its founder, and on a narrative turning the internationalization of French physics into a national imperative, this pilot institution was instrumental in the reconstruction of a European world of physics after the Second World War. It articulated local, national and global scales by intertwining resources derived from extremely heterogeneous social networks, by federating and binding together a remarkable diversity of actors, from old Girl Scout friends to state officials and NATO pundits. It managed this last without turning into a mere pawn in the Cold War. In the long run, beyond its role in the establishment of new ideas in theoretical physics, Les Houches laid the foundation for a new model for science training, based on fundamental and theoretical research, proving through example the power of teaching (and evaluating) by osmosis amongst advanced students. The creators of the troisième cycle in 1954, the much-awaited postgraduate level of studies, explicitly evoked the lessons learned on the Alps’ slopes.Footnote 79 The summer school demonstrated how pedagogical institutions could mirror and drive wider scientific change. It played a key role in the profound reconfiguration of scientific circulations, careers, institutions and practices after 1945, and in a transformation of the physicist's craft that might be characterized, in a nutshell, as the transition from the scholar's world to the researcher's world. Truly, as Blake (almost) said, ‘great things are done when (wo)men and mountains meet’.
