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With the AcADémie DeS ScienceS in
2013 - 2014
in europe
Franco-German relations: a model
Thanks to the initiatives of rapprochement they have taken in the last decades
and to the many cooperation projects on which French and German partners are
successfully working, France and Germany share particularly tight links with one
another.
2013 was marked by the 50
th
anniversary of the Élysée
Treaty: on 22 January 1963, General de Gaulle and
Chancellor Adenauer signed this treaty of cooperation,
designed to seal the reconciliation between France
and the Federal Republic of Germany:
• on 6 February 2013, a Franco-German interacademic seminar was
held in Paris on the instigation of three academies of the Institut de
France - Académie des Sciences, Académie Française, Académie des
Sciences Morales et Politiques - and two German academies -
Nationale
Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina and Berlin-Brandenburgische
Akademie der Wissenschaften
. Entitled
The Enlightenment: Yesterday,
Today, Tomorrow
, it reviewed the adventure of the Enlightenment
movement -
die Aufklärung
-, a philosophical and cultural inclination
towards modernity equally shared by the two countries and which forged
the European soul. This philosophy of the Enlightenment demonstrated,
from Diderot to Kant, d’Alembert to Leibniz, Voltaire to Formey, their
primal spiritual union, commitment and common responsibility in the
genesis of the European mind. This seminar was also an opportunity
to demonstrate how tightly science intertwines with moral and political
reflections in this conception of progress;
• on 15 April 2013, the Académie des Sciences greeted the German and French
ministers of higher education and research for a day under the sign of science
diplomacy. Johanna Wanka and Geneviève Fioraso jointly inaugurated the Franco-
GermanWeek of Science and Alumni organized by the Embassy of Germany in Paris.
In the morning, a round-table meeting was held on the value that Franco-German
higher education training and research programmes add to youth employment,
and on the signatures of seven cooperation agreements involving institutions from
these two countries. The Académie des sciences and the
Nationale Akademie der
Wissenschaften Leopoldina
have also ratified a cooperation policy that enables
them to engage in perennial joint reflections and scientific projects involving a
shared leadership. The afternoon was devoted to science itself: once introduced by
eminent personalities, each of the four laureates of the 2012 Gay-Lussac Humboldt
Prize expounded his/her work, then the session was brought to a close by Ernst-
LudwigWinnacker, from the
Leopoldina
, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, a member of
the Académie and 1997 Award of the Nobel Prize in physics, who took the floor to
look into the joint research perspectives France and Germany share.
© fpdress - Fotolia
© institut de France
© Brigitte eymann
© k.line - Fotolia
The German and French ministers of higher education
and research Johanna Wanka and Geneviève Fioraso,
the Secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie Catherine
Bréchignac, the presidents of the signatory academies,
Philippe Taquet and Jörg Hacker (from left to right and
top to bottom)