La création du CNRS

Abstract

How CNRS came to be The CNRS was born six weeks after World War II started. Its birth certificate was an October 19, 1939 decree, intended to “coordinate laboratories” activities in order to draw a higher output from scientific research. This gave the CNRS the authority to merge a scientific fund supporting academic research (The National Fund for Scientific Research) and an institute carrying out the research programs started by the scientists in order to develop scientific research for the war (the National Center for Applied Scientific Research). Physics became an essential part in scientific organization, both in basic research (in astrophysics, in corpuscular physics...) and, in the Programs necessary to the Ministry of Defense (in fields such as atomic fission, ultra-high, frequencies, etc.). The war, followed by French defeat and German occupation reinforced the priority given to finalized research. French research setup was later modified at the end of the war. In fact, the CNRS - created and maintained under the National Education Ministry’s supervision - had not succeeded in coordinating the main State services. New organizations were being created, such as the National Hygiene Institute (later called INSERM) in 1941; the National Center of Telecommunication Studies in 1944; the Atomic Energy Commission in (1945, etc. Simultaneously, the academic community was asserting its wish to regain a directing power that scientists had taken away from it. A law was voted on August 12, 1945, proclaiming that the CNRS’s objective was to support pure science and academic research. This law also established that a “science parliament”, the National Committee, would be in charge of defining the CNRS’ main orientations. However, the functioning of such an intermediary agency ran against the physicists’ interests. Physics had become an extensive science which could not be developed with meager budget allocations typically endowed to a science fund. And physicists were not long in creating new institutes to free themselves from the CNRS’ supervision.