The Paris/Geneva Divide. A Network Analysis of the Archives of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations

The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) is often framed as a step in the constitution of a “League of Minds” – a place where scientists and writers reign, and a necessary part of a successful and harmonious “League of Nations” – but the fact that it was created in the context of a bureaucratic and politicised international administration leaves little room for such creativity. In reality, intellectual cooperation is one of the technical elements of the impressive but imperfect machinery that is the inter-war League of Nations (LoN from now on). However, the ICIC’s universal aspect and its sympathy capital, fuelled by the appointment of leading scientific and cultural personalities, including Albert Einstein, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Bergson, and Jagadish Chandra Bose, make it an organ of the League that en- joys high visibility in proportion to its modest size. This explains why the recovery of the symbolic benefits of intellectual cooperation is at the heart of a power game between the Geneva administration and the main powers of the LoN Assembly. On the one hand, Great Britain and its dominions are fighting to prevent these secondary, strictly national or private issues from hampering the fundamental missions – political, financial, and technical – of the League of Nations. France and most of the Latin countries, on the other hand, see an excellent opportunity to globalise cultural issues and impose the vision of a civilising and universal League. In between, with an independent political agenda that prevents it from being a totally impartial arbiter, is the Geneva secretariat, which tries, despite lacking means, to make this small technical organisation work and legitimise it. This dynamic originates in Geneva, a city chosen by the nations participating in the Paris Peace Conference because of the neutrality of its territory, be- cause of the fact that it has international status without being the capital of a state, and certainly also because of William Rappart’s lobbying of President Woodrow Wilson (Fleury 1981). As the capital of a belligerent country, Paris was excluded de facto from being the seat of the League (Geneva’s competitors were Brussels and The Hague). However, it is in Paris that intellectual cooperation finds its most powerful and effective echo. The French government’s offer to house an institute dedicated to helping to the Geneva Committee just a stone’s throw from the Louvre, made only a few years after the ICIC’s first efforts, introduces a key piece to the chessboard of cultural relations in the 1920s – a small step for scientific and intellectual coordination, but a giant step for France’s influence and its cultural diplomacy. Indeed, from 1926 onward, France’s International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) proves to be a significant counterweight to the Secretariat of the League of Nations – so much so that the latter tries unceasingly to regulate the Institute’s