Frédéric Joliot, les allemands et l'université aux premiers mois de l'occupation

Abstract

Frédéric Joliot, the Germans and the university in the first few months of the occupation. To save the Collège de France laboratory and the cyclotron he perfected, Frédéric Joliot decided to return to Paris in the summer of 1940. Pressure was put on him by the German authorities to turn the laboratory over to them, which he refused, but he had to accept the presence of German scientists working alongside him. The cooperation with physicists like Wolfgang Gentner and Otto Hahn extended the interests shared prior to the war. The former, known for his anti nazism, and the technical limits of the French cyclotron excluded any possibility of exploi-ting this coopération for German military research. Exasperated even before the war by the French élites failings, Joliot used his scientific prestige to develop research and participated in the beginning university resistance groups around Paul Langevin and Jacques Solomon. Although they were not in the majority, he and his friends supported Langevin, arrested in october 1940. This position became clearer through the analysis of the tensions within the university about what the attitude should be toward Vichy and the Germans. It went along with the Collège de France professors' revolt against collaborators' accusations. Far from providing an example of a "voluntary accommodation" (P. Burrin) with the occupier, Frédéric Joliot sacrificed his personal destiny as a researcher to a group project of resistance that, in addition, counted on the scientific renewal of France.