Survivre

Montreal, late July

After the May 25 decision and June 9 confirmation of an October 1 IHÉS departure, Grothendieck arrived in Montreal with a new public priority.11Grothendieck, Aux membres du Comité scientifique [de l’IHÉS]; Grothendieck, Letter to the director of the IHÉS confirming his departure.

Grothendieck had traveled to Montreal to lecture at a summer school in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. His mathematical subject concerned Barsotti–Tate groups and crystalline methods, a line of inquiry developed with students and colleagues during the same period. He accepted the invitation on a condition: the program must also make room, with comparable visibility, for an address on scientists and military institutions. That demand was itself a new use of mathematical reputation. Instead of renouncing the invitation, he attempted to make the invitation carry a second public obligation.22Alexandre Grothendieck, “Groupes de Barsotti-Tate et cristaux,” Actes du Congrès international des mathématiciens (Nice, 1970) (Paris) 1 (1971): 431–36; Céline Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme” (Mémoire en sciences sociales, EHESS–Centre Alexandre Koyré, 2009), 54, https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Pessis.pdf.

After the talks, a small group organized a movement. The exact day is less settled than many short biographies imply. A later masthead dated the foundation to July 20. One reconstruction places a first assembly on July 24; Céline Pessis, working from the periodical and participants’ records, gives July 27. The safest description is also the most faithful to the process: Survivre formed in Montreal in late July 1970. The variation is not a trivial nuisance. It warns against imagining a single founding ceremony at which a finished doctrine and a permanent membership appeared.

The three dates do not count as three independent observations of one event. July 20 appears in the movement’s later masthead; July 24 and July 27 enter through retrospective reconstructions of meetings and organization. The sources may describe different stages—initial agreement, an assembly, or formal organization—without using founding in the same sense. No surviving record in the available record establishes which stage deserves a single anniversary. The month and place are stable; the day and the act it labels remain contested. That is why the narrative states the bounded common ground rather than averaging or selecting the dates. The uncertainty itself records a movement taking shape through several acts, not a single ceremony. No single day controls it.33Survivre … et vivre, no. 9; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 54; Winfried Scharlau, Who Is Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchy, Mathematics, Spirituality, Solitude. Part 3: Spirituality, trans. Melissa Schneps (n.d.), https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Spirituality/, ch. 6.

Nor was the movement simply created by the three famous French names often given in retrospect. Grothendieck was its principal initiator. Gordon Edwards, a young Canadian mathematician deeply affected by his address, shared the first editorial work. A provisional administrative group listed Matilde Escuder, Grothendieck, Paul Koosis, William Messing, and Edouard Wagneur. The first membership list contained twenty-five names, most of them mathematicians. Claude Chevalley and Pierre Samuel would soon become central to the French edition and to the public identity of the movement, but making them co-founders at the Montreal moment erases the younger and less celebrated people who made the first organization possible.

The title was a verb in the infinitive: Survivre, to survive. The first issue called the project international and made the survival of humanity and life in general its object. The formulation joined human continuity to wider biological survival. Industrial society, it said, produced ecological imbalance through pollution and the destruction of environments and resources; military conflict and the threat of conflict formed the other side of the emergency. In one formulation, the movement wanted to bridge the separation between Science and Life, scientists and the population. It proposed continuing education, public information, struggle against military apparatuses, and theoretical and practical contributions. These were headings rather than an operational strategy. Their breadth was an asset for recruitment and a source of later disagreement.44Survivre … et vivre, no. 1, pp. 2–4.

The name made no promise of optimism. It also did not yet carry the richer ecological and countercultural meanings that later issues would give it. Survival could describe the minimum condition shared by people otherwise divided in ideology and profession. It could link weapons to pollution and scientists to non-scientists. But a denominator common enough to cover everything could also leave uncertain what to do first and who could speak for whom. The first issue tried to resolve this by combining a manifesto, proposed structures, reports of meetings, essays on the divorce of science from life, and a membership list. The form itself showed an experiment trying to become an institution before its members agreed what kind of institution they wanted.

The public program carried into Montreal

On June 26, 1970, Grothendieck spoke at Orsay on The Responsibility of the Scientist Today, or, in the subtitle attached to the circulated text, The Scientist and the Military Apparatus. A related address followed at the University of Montreal on July 8. The essay did not pretend to be a complete political economy of science. Indeed, it answered critics who wanted first to settle the underlying causes of militarism—class structure, profit, imperial competition—by insisting on immediate conduct. A scientist who condemned the military, he argued, should begin by refusing its money and warning others. Collective and more effective action would have to follow, but an analysis that indefinitely postponed refusal had become, for him, another accommodation.55Grothendieck, “Responsabilité du savant dans le monde d’aujourd’hui”; Alexander Grothendieck, “The Responsibility of the Scientist Today,” in Queen’s Papers in Pure and Applied Mathematics, trans. Gordon Edwards, no. 27, preprint, 1971, 84–87, https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Responsibility.pdf.

The address was severe, but not as simple as the later image of an enemy of science suggests. It opened with the destructive capacity accumulated after the Second World War, then turned to the habits that allowed scientists to collaborate directly or indirectly with military establishments. It asked for total non-collaboration as a first moral line. Yet it also described the action as preliminary, psychologically more important than practically sufficient. It called for organization, persistence, and education. The distinction matters. The address did not claim that the removal of one grant, or the purity of one researcher, would dismantle an armaments system. It argued that people compromised by that system were unlikely to oppose it decisively, and that refusal was a way to prepare for further action.

This language belonged to its time. The Vietnam War had exposed a dense connection among laboratories, industrial firms, universities, and military agencies, especially in the United States. Scientists and engineers there had struck, marched, challenged professional societies, and formed groups such as Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action. Some mathematicians had contested the American Mathematical Society’s contracts and its political silences. Environmental alarm was also moving rapidly into public culture: weapons fallout, industrial pollution, pesticide use, population, and resource depletion appeared not as separate inconveniences but as threats to a planetary system. Grothendieck encountered these arguments through people, pamphlets, and travels rather than by first mastering a new academic discipline.66Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 54–60.

His own text joins two temporal scales. One is immediate: a contract could be refused, a professional meeting interrupted, a colleague asked to account for a grant. The other was catastrophic: the text warned that human beings possessed the means to terminate a political order and life on Earth. That prospect gave the first scale its urgency. It also encouraged assertions whose scientific basis was uneven and whose deadlines would repeatedly change. To recover the force of his position without adopting its every forecast, one must keep both scales visible. He was not using extinction as an ornamental metaphor. Nor did the reality of nuclear danger prove every social diagnosis that he attached to it. The movement about to form would live inside that tension.

The labor of a first issue

The August number ran to forty-one pages. Its plain mimeographed appearance did not announce a movement with staff or a settled graphic identity. Grothendieck later recalled that he had written the entire issue and characterized its tone as naive but convinced. That recollection came more than a decade later and should not be treated as an inventory of every line; it nevertheless accords with the extraordinary concentration of his early labor. The movement that denounced specialization initially depended heavily on one specialist’s speed, money, correspondence, and willingness to draft an entire program.77Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 163.

The text The Scientists and the Military Apparatus, written with material from discussions in Montreal, translated the earlier address into a movement document. Other pages debated provisional rules and the authority to speak for the organization. That concern was not decorative. A group founded by a man of exceptional professional prestige had to decide whether his name would function as command, guarantee, or merely an instrument of access. The first structures included councils and membership, but the journal would later deny any individual authority to represent the movement. Its institutional imagination oscillated from the beginning: it wanted the coordination needed for action and the freedom that coordination could so quickly constrain.

The early social composition sharpened the problem. Eighteen of the first twenty-five listed members were mathematicians. That concentration supplied international connections, university rooms, printing money, and a language of professional responsibility. It also threatened to reproduce the distance between scientific elites and everyone else that the movement wished to close. Opening the group did not automatically undo hierarchy. A famous lecturer could invite non-scientists into a discussion while remaining the person whose invitation made the room available. A journal could denounce experts while relying on the prestige of experts to be read. These tensions were already explicit in the bulletins.88Survivre … et vivre, no. 1; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 70–84.

The participation of Edwards is especially important here. He was neither a decorative convert nor a future footnote to a French story. He carried an English-language edition under difficult conditions and went on to a sustained life in antinuclear advocacy in Canada. Messing, then working on mathematics closely related to Grothendieck’s lectures, joined the provisional board. Escuder, identified in the records as a primary-school teacher, brought connections not reducible to a research institute. Koosis and Wagneur supplied North American mathematical networks. Survivre did not escape dependence on Grothendieck, but its beginning was already plural enough to frustrate a story of solitary authorship.

The scientist as a political worker

The first program addressed scientists with unusual directness because it assigned them a responsibility different from the familiar role of the public intellectual. A famous scholar might traditionally sign a petition, advise a government, or speak on a matter of conscience outside the laboratory. In Grothendieck’s argument, that division was already part of the problem. The scientist’s political life could not begin only after the scientific day had ended. Grants, conferences, professional societies, research agendas, and the authority conferred by a title were political relations before any petition was signed. Responsibility therefore required examining work from within: who paid for it, what institutions it strengthened, what habits of obedience it trained, and who remained unable to question it.99Grothendieck, “Responsabilité du savant dans le monde d’aujourd’hui”; Grothendieck, “The Responsibility of the Scientist Today”; Alexandre Grothendieck, “Comment je suis devenu militant ?” Survivre et Vivre, January 1971, https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Militant.pdf.

This was a more demanding claim than opposition to classified weapons research. Most mathematicians in his professional milieu did not design weapons. Some refused such work and regarded their own research as harmless. The military money that disturbed him could arrive without a research directive and purchase nothing more visible than time, travel, or institutional stability. His colleagues could therefore say, with reason, that a theorem in algebraic geometry had not been converted into a bomb and that the subsidy had not altered a proof. He answered at another level: accepting the relation made the military appear a legitimate patron of free culture and made researchers beneficiaries of the apparatus they condemned in public. The disagreement was not over whether equations had intentions. It was over whether institutional association carried moral and political meaning.

The argument had a purifying tendency, and its limits were apparent early. The unresolved question was where complicity ended. Industrial donors sold ordinary goods and also held defense contracts. Governments financed universities while maintaining armies. Taxes supported both hospitals and weapons. A strict search for uncontaminated money could make paid scientific work impossible without identifying which refusals changed power. Grothendieck’s later CERN discussion would acknowledge that he had first distinguished military grants from industrial funds, then discovered military connections among firms he had treated as ordinary patrons. He concluded that the connections were inextricable. That discovery could lead either to paralysis or to a broader politics. Survivre’s published program pursued the broader course.1010Alexandre Grothendieck, “Allons-nous continuer la recherche scientifique ?” Lecture at CERN, Geneva, January 27, 1972, 31–32, https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Allonsnous.pdf.

The movement’s early answer was not to certify personal innocence. It asked scientists to investigate and publish connections, refuse direct military support, support conscientious objectors, and use professional occasions to open discussion. It hoped that small withdrawals could accumulate and that the international nature of science might permit action across national blocks. That hope retained something of the older ideal of a republic of scholars united by truth. Yet Survivre turned the ideal against the institutions that claimed to embody it. Scientific cooperation still coexisted with military nationalism, while decisions about the conditions of knowledge remained with directors, generals, and industrial patrons.

Grothendieck’s position also differed from the Pugwash model in which eminent scientists used expert knowledge to advise against nuclear danger. His public arguments retained technical information, and early bulletins actively sought it, while rejecting experts’ exclusive political authority over dangers created by technical institutions. The person asked to evaluate a weapons system might remain inside the same hierarchy that produced it. Survivre proposed opening membership beyond science and making scientists answer to the population rather than merely counsel rulers. This was an aspiration, not an achievement. The first issue’s membership and prose still spoke in the voice of educated professionals trying to awaken others.1111Survivre … et vivre, no. 1; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 70–84.

That paternal residue mattered. The journal could describe the population as if it waited outside science for information to descend. It could celebrate the moral courage of the savant while criticizing the savant’s privilege. Grothendieck’s established reputation gave the group access to mathematical halls and public audiences. He conditioned lecture invitations on a second public discussion and distributed the bulletin at Nice. Those documented uses of professional standing also kept a famous man at the center of the cause’s public presentation. Later issues would attack the myth of the expert more radically and seek forms in which people spoke from their own experience. The distance between those later ambitions and the first issue is part of the movement’s history, not a defect to be edited away.1212Survivre … et vivre, nos. 2–3; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 54–64.

The difficult pronoun

The first issue repeatedly used we. The pronoun created solidarity among people who had only recently met, but it also posed a constitutional question. The pronoun could refer to the provisional council, subscribers, scientists prepared to refuse military money, every person threatened by industrial civilization, or the future movement imagined by its authors. Rules could answer administratively without answering politically. A council might count votes, yet it could not make a shared understanding where none existed. Conversely, refusing all structure could leave decisions in the hands of whoever possessed the most time, confidence, or reputation.

Grothendieck’s work with Bourbaki supplied a public example of a productive collective name. There, mathematicians had submitted manuscripts to exacting group criticism and published under a fictional author. Membership rules, including retirement with age, were meant to prevent personal possession of the project. Survivre could not simply reproduce that arrangement. Bourbaki’s members shared a specialized competence and a relatively clear task. The survival of life was not a text that a small group could complete, and the people most affected by industrial or military decisions could not be selected by mathematical peers. The very universality of the new aim made an expert vanguard suspect.

The comparison nevertheless helps explain why organizational questions received so many pages. For Grothendieck, procedure was not secondary to truth. He had seen collective mathematical work magnify individual invention; he had also seen institutions conceal funding and professional hierarchies silence moral disagreement. A movement needed enough form to preserve memory, distribute labor, and resist the authority of its strongest personality. It also needed to remain revisable. The early documents proposed a provisional council and future structures; their explicit provisional status denied the Montreal arrangement permanent legitimacy.

The problem was sharpened by geography. A movement formed in Montreal aspired to be international, but Grothendieck returned to France, where he had the time and resources to produce issues. Edwards remained responsible for an English edition in a different political environment. Translation was slow; North American contributors had their own campaigns and academic pressures. International could easily become a French journal with foreign correspondents. The first numbers kept American materials prominent and printed addresses across borders; the surviving publication and correspondence record suggests that the editorial center of gravity moved toward Paris and its suburbs.1313Scharlau, Spirituality, ch. 6.

Language itself created divisions. The phrase military apparatus resonated differently in a United States at war in Vietnam, a Canada receiving American draft resisters, and a France whose recent wars in Indochina and Algeria remained politically raw. Ecology could mean a biological science, protection of landscapes, pollution control, opposition to industrial growth, or a transformation of everyday life. Revolution attracted some participants and repelled nonviolent reformers; nonviolence could appear courageous to an objector and evasive to a supporter of Vietnamese liberation. Survivre did not begin after these meanings had been reconciled. The paper was one of the places where they collided.

This makes the group’s provisional character more than an organizational weakness. The instability allowed people from otherwise separate currents to work together. It also meant that later claims made under the title cannot be projected backward onto every founder. A collective editorial against nuclear energy in 1972 did not express a platform unanimously adopted in Montreal. The radical critique of expertise in 1971–72 developed through argument, experience, and the arrival of new writers. To narrate Survivre as the execution of Grothendieck’s original vision would miss its capacity to change him as well.

At the congress in Nice

The first major test came almost immediately. From September 1 to 10, 1970, roughly three thousand mathematicians gathered in Nice for the International Congress of Mathematicians. Jean Dieudonné, Grothendieck’s collaborator in the writing of Éléments de géométrie algébrique, had a leading organizational role. The congress also displayed shifts within French mathematics: applied mathematics was gaining institutional authority, the state was urging mathematicians toward socially productive work, and disputes over Vietnam and military funding lay close beneath the formal program. Into that meeting Grothendieck brought about 1,200 copies of the new bulletin, by his own later report.1414Survivre … et vivre, nos. 2–3, pp. 15–20.

The scene is often retold as theater: the celebrated geometer in shorts with a shaved head, passing out tracts among ceremonially dressed institutions, provoking old collaborators. Contemporary newspaper description did note his appearance, and later recollections preserved confrontations. But clothing is not an explanation, and anecdote can make the political disagreement look like a clash of temperaments. The essential act was simpler. He attempted to move the financing and uses of mathematics from the corridors into the program’s public space. When a speaker mentioned a possible military application, Grothendieck challenged the assumption that such an application was merely another sign of relevance. Meetings associated with Survivre and Vietnam pressed political questions into a congress designed to contain them at its edges.1515Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 60–64.

The response was not mass conversion. Grothendieck later remembered only two or three adhesions, although sympathy and formal membership cannot be equated. He also remembered embarrassment. Some mathematicians opposed military work yet disliked his willingness to expose professional compromises at an international meeting. Some supported resistance to the Vietnam War but not a general refusal of military-linked funds. Some considered pure mathematics too remote from application to bear the responsibility he assigned it. Others may simply have distrusted a movement whose program ranged from disarmament to ecological survival before it had demonstrated a practical method.

Grothendieck’s own report in issues 2–3 did not moderate the indictment. He described shame and nausea at recognizing his own image and that of esteemed colleagues through a distorting mirror. The phrase has often been used as proof that mathematics itself had become repellent to him. In context, the mirror was the mathematical community’s relation to prestige, funding, and moral compartmentalization. The disgust included himself. It was not a claim that his earlier theorems had become false, nor yet a promise never to teach again. The target was the protected social world in which agreement on mathematical questions made disagreement about institutions easy to avoid.1616Survivre … et vivre, nos. 2–3; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 63–64.

Nice therefore produced no clean victory. The bulletin reached thousands of hands and obtained few memberships. The intervention helped make military finance discussable, and later accounts indicate that its manner and venue strained professional relationships. Those consequences do not by themselves measure success or failure. The record shows Grothendieck testing whether scientific fame could be converted into collective dissent and shows the limit of that conversion: fame opened the hall, while formal adhesions remained few.1717Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 60–64; Pierre Cartier, “A Country of Which Nothing Is Known but the Name: Grothendieck and ‘Motives’,” in Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait, ed. Leila Schneps (International Press, 2014), 13–14, https://www.landsburg.com/grothendieck/cartier.pdf.

What a congress protected

The political charge of Nice becomes clearer when set beside the congress’s own public language. The French education minister opened the meeting by encouraging mathematicians to leave their ivory tower and contribute to the tasks society required. Such an appeal could sound close to Grothendieck’s demand for responsibility. In practice the two pointed in different directions. The state sought more useful mathematics, including applications to natural and human sciences and the modernization of French industry. Grothendieck was asking who defined usefulness, which institutions benefited, and whether refusing a socially demanded task might be more responsible than performing it.1818Survivre … et vivre, nos. 2–3; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 60–63.

French mathematics was also negotiating an internal shift. Bourbaki’s axiomatic style and the prestige of pure research had shaped a generation. Applied mathematics, computation, control theory, and modeling were gaining resources and authority, associated particularly with figures such as Jacques-Louis Lions. Some pure mathematicians regarded military and industrial connections with suspicion while defending the autonomy of fundamental research. Grothendieck’s intervention made that defense difficult. If pure mathematics depended on military or industrial patrons, autonomy could be a self-description rather than a material fact. Rejecting applications to preserve purity did not by itself answer the social question.

He did not offer a stable alternative in Nice. The first bulletin wanted science subordinated to human needs without establishing who could identify those needs without becoming another authority. It condemned the military while relying on scientific internationalism, a structure built partly through Cold War institutions. It called for ecological knowledge without yet possessing much of it. His challenge exposed contradictions more readily than it organized a coalition. That imbalance helps explain why even colleagues sympathetic to peace could experience the intervention as destructive of patient political work.

Pierre Cartier later wrote that Grothendieck’s provocations at Nice and elsewhere could ruin delicate arrangements made by friends. Such testimony deserves attention because it came from within the mathematical community and because political action has consequences beyond the actor’s intention. But that kind of delicate arrangement is not a neutral good. It can mean the difficult construction of support; it can also mean the etiquette by which powerful institutions keep embarrassing questions informal. The evidence does not permit a general verdict. It permits a more exact description: Grothendieck made a public break rather than working only through professional negotiation. Cartier’s retrospective account connects that choice to disrupted arrangements.1919Cartier, “A Country of Which Nothing Is Known but the Name: Grothendieck and ‘Motives’”.

The confrontation with Dieudonné carried particular weight. Their collaboration had joined Grothendieck’s expansive conceptual work to Dieudonné’s formidable labor of exposition. At Nice, the organizer’s duty to maintain the congress and the activist’s effort to disrupt its boundaries came into conflict. Later retellings turn the encounter into a symbolic divorce between the old mathematics and the new politics. The record is less tidy. Dieudonné’s mathematical labor remained embedded in volumes that would continue to circulate, and Grothendieck still lectured on advanced mathematics. Their disagreement did not dissolve the intellectual history.

Nice also taught Survivre something about audience. Distributing a thousand copies did not create a thousand participants. A tract could embarrass, be discarded, or be read months later. Formal adhesions measured only one kind of effect. In his later account, Grothendieck linked disappointment at the small response to an expectation that the urgency would be self-evident once stated. The movement would gradually move away from that model of transmission—from a knower announcing danger to people who ought to awaken—and toward debates that treated the relations inside the room as political material. The change was neither complete nor irreversible, but the disappointing congress helped make it necessary.

How I became an activist

By the December discussion at Paris VI, Grothendieck could already present the preceding months as a before-and-after story. The published summary states that activism for Survivre had occupied most of his time since the end of July 1970. The statement names time, not purity. It does not say all his time; it acknowledges that the new labor had become the majority. The word militant had military ancestry and uncomfortable echoes for a movement drawn to nonviolence, yet he used it to mark disciplined, public commitment rather than opinion.2020Grothendieck, “Comment je suis devenu militant ?”

In the December 1970 summary, he linked the new work to earlier discomfort over military contracts and to university discussions during May 1968. He then described conversations about arms broadening into the problem of survival. This was a dated self-account, not a complete causal record.2121Grothendieck, “Comment je suis devenu militant ?”

The published sequence resists both a single-conversion story and later claims that ecological language concealed mathematical exhaustion. It records the public reasons he gave and the work that followed; it does not establish unrecorded private causes.

His early articles repeatedly moved from examples to general programs and challenged local repairs that left institutional arrangements intact. Those textual choices describe an argument; they do not license a causal analogy between mathematical theory and politics. Human groups do not obey the coherence conditions of a category, and a social contradiction is not solved by finding the right universal object.

A movement rather than an exit

In the autumn of 1970 the French editorial group broadened. Chevalley, a founding member of Bourbaki with a long history of political independence, became publication director. Samuel brought organizational steadiness and would serve as treasurer and editor. Roger Godement publicly attacked military funding in the mathematical world. Younger teachers and researchers, many formed by the disputes of 1968 at Paris and Vincennes, brought critiques of hierarchy, education, scientism, and the Communist Party. Denis Guedj in particular would push the group toward desire, everyday life, and cultural subversion. These were not disciples arranged around a doctrine. They brought different Left traditions, different attitudes to scientific knowledge, and different tolerances for organization.2222Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 84–113.

The movement found allies among conscientious objectors and nonviolent groups. That connection gave practical meaning to refusal. France had recognized a restricted status for conscientious objection only in 1963; the civil service imposed on recognized objectors lasted twice as long as military service, while others were prosecuted or imprisoned. Survivre printed their struggles, addresses, and accounts. It learned from groups that treated non-cooperation not as passivity but as an organized withdrawal of assistance. The journal argued that national defense need not be answered by a rival apparatus of violence. Its early pacifism was therefore more radical than a call for arms limitation and less attached than revolutionary groups to wars of national liberation.2323Survivre … et vivre, no. 7; Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 64–69.

That position brought disagreement. To militants who believed anti-colonial violence necessary, universal nonviolence could conceal unequal power. To scientists who supported negotiated arms control, total non-collaboration looked politically ineffective. Grothendieck argued that both objections risked preserving the apparatus that made war permanent. The bulletin prints arguments rather than resolving them. Its political location cannot be captured by saying simply the Left. It opposed American war in Vietnam, Soviet repression, Communist institutional discipline, and capitalist military industry. It printed favorable accounts of aspects of American counterculture and tested forms of direct action outside party authority.

The title Survivre held those positions together for a time because it claimed an emergency prior to their differences. Yet its grammar was already under strain. To survive could mean preventing nuclear war, refusing military money, protecting ecosystems, changing consumption, transforming education, or reorganizing relationships. An agenda capable of including all these objects required more than the will of its initiator. It required a journal, accounts, translation, subscriptions, addresses, meeting rooms, envelopes, and people who disagreed about what the next number should contain. The movement was not the dramatic afterlife of a resignation. It was an accumulation of ordinary tasks.

Three generations in one room

Survivre brought together people whose political educations had occurred at different moments. Chevalley belonged to a generation formed before the Second World War, marked by antifascism, libertarian commitments, and a long experience of mathematical institutions. Samuel and Grothendieck had built postwar careers during the expansion and internationalization of French science. Younger teachers and students had entered politics through Vietnam, May 1968, experimental universities, feminism, anti-psychiatry, and counterculture.2424Pessis, “Les années 1968 et la science: Survivre … et Vivre, des mathématiciens critiques à l’origine de l’écologisme,” 84–113.

Age did not produce a simple scale from moderation to radicalism. Chevalley’s hostility to hierarchy could be more uncompromising than a younger participant’s party discipline. Samuel’s pragmatic organization supported a long ecological career. Grothendieck, in his early forties, could appear simultaneously as established savant and convert discovering a world familiar to younger activists. The categories crossed one another.

The mixture affected language. Older scientific responsibility discourse spoke of the savant’s moral duty. The 1968 generation distrusted the savant as a social type and asked who had granted him speech. Nonviolent traditions emphasized conscience and disciplined refusal. Libertarian and Maoist currents emphasized popular creativity, desire, and attack on representation. The journal’s movement from scientist to people can be traced through these encounters.

Grothendieck’s exceptional openness to some younger participants was one source of the movement’s energy. He did not require them to match his mathematical status before taking their politics seriously. He could also appropriate new language with great speed and return it as a systematic program, making its earlier speakers less visible. Guedj later described this combination as stubbornness and openness: once engaged, Grothendieck worked through an issue with overwhelming force.

The generational mixture also changed time horizons. A senior professor could bring institutional memory; a student could treat the institution as already obsolete. Someone who had survived war might hear survival literally and morally; someone immersed in counterculture might reject mere survival as a joyless demand. The title’s later ellipsis held a debate between these temporal sensibilities as well as an ecological theory.

Families entered the meetings and complicated the image of a political cell. Children, partners, and friends accompanied participants. This could make politics continuous with life rather than a male evening association. It could also leave women identified through relationships and responsible for care while men argued. The movement’s attack on the division between public and private began inside arrangements that still reproduced it.

No generation possessed the final political truth. The older participants’ experience could become authority; the younger participants’ novelty could become fashion. Survivre’s brief vitality came from keeping them in contact long enough to change the journal. Its later fractures show how difficult it was to turn contact into a durable common form.

The Atlantic did not disappear

The French concentration of work did not make North America merely a prelude. The English edition, although slower and less regular, addressed questions that the French pages could not simply translate: uranium mining, Indigenous communities, the organization of American professional societies, and the conditions of Canadian universities. Edwards struggled with a basic material difficulty—few participants could write fluently and persuasively in both languages. Translation made visible how much a political text depends on idiom, context, and volunteer time.

Grothendieck’s presence at Queen’s University in Kingston from January into March 1971 temporarily strengthened that connection. He lectured on group schemes while the university’s mathematical papers published Gordon Edwards’s translation of The Responsibility of the Scientist Today. The volume’s preface introduced him in conventional academic terms—as an original and prolific mathematician who had charmed his auditors—and then identified his new campaign. The juxtaposition gave his argument a readership through the very academic apparatus it questioned.2525Grothendieck, “The Responsibility of the Scientist Today,” iv–v.

Calling the arrangement hypocrisy would be incomplete. Publication and travel were available means; he was trying to alter their use before he had created alternatives. The Queen’s volume also fixed a version of the 1970 address in English and named its translator, allowing the text to travel beyond the French bulletin. Yet academic publication changed its setting. An urgent call for refusal now sat beside papers on operator algebras and the opening of a mathematics building. Readers could encounter it as an essay rather than a demand made in a room.

That double life—mathematical visitor and organizer—would become his method for the next two years. He did not first construct a separate activist career and then leave mathematics. Invitations intended for the mathematician were made to carry a second event. Contacts with students and researchers became possible distributors and local groups. The arrangement depended on the durability of the reputation he was criticizing. It also exposed him to audiences able to challenge his claims rather than merely admire them. The lecture would become a political form in its own right.

At this early point, however, the paper remained the central object. A journal could preserve an argument after a meeting, connect people who had never shared a room, and reveal disagreements without requiring a final vote. It could also consume nearly every hour available. The movement’s next phase would be measured by manifestos, print runs, sacks of mail, cartoons, food networks, fêtes, and the labor of people whose names did not stand on lecture posters. The problem of survival was about to acquire an earth, a household, and a daily life.

The first winter

The first issues appeared monthly or nearly so: a combined second and third number in September–October, no. 4 in November, no. 5 in December, no. 6 in January. The editorial pace materialized Grothendieck’s urgency. Pages moved among nonviolent action in the United States, conscientious objection, ecological pollution, military research, education, letters, and internal structure. Readers were asked to agree, distribute copies, form contacts, translate, gather information, and examine the institutions that paid them. The paper was both publication and provisional organization.

In the January issue, How I Became an Activist gave the group a public origin story. Origin stories create coherence; they also privilege the person able to narrate them. Grothendieck’s account placed his own decision at the center while naming colleagues, arguments, and failures. It admitted negligence. It did not claim that the rest of Survivre had followed the same route. For Edwards, the Montreal address was decisive. For Chevalley, the political engagement preceded the group. For younger Paris mathematicians, May 1968 and struggles over teaching were central. For objectors, refusal of military service had its own history. A responsible biography can retain the power of Grothendieck’s narrative without making it the group’s only past.

By January 1971 he had exchanged the concentrated time of Bures for a divided life: a prestigious temporary appointment, mathematical teaching, a growing correspondence, editing, public discussions, and the attempt to turn alarm into an international network. He had not withdrawn from the world. He had entered more rooms than before. Later he would remember the period as one in which he dealt with an unprecedented number of people; contemporary records already show the beginning of that multiplication.

The word at the head of the journal remained austere. Survival named the fear that civilization might destroy the conditions of life. But the people joining the paper were beginning to ask a different question. If survival meant only the continuation of industrial discipline, expert rule, and damaged human relations, what exactly deserved to survive? Within months the masthead would acquire two more words and an ellipsis: Survivre… et vivre. The change did not leave the emergency behind. It marked a recognition that opposition to death could not by itself describe a politics of life.