Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information (science.culture) by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

Author:Eva Hemmungs Wirtén [Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226235981
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

II

As it turned out, there already was an organization dealing with many of the same topics that the CICI now gave itself the mission to address, and it was headquartered in Brussels, where Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943) and Paul Otlet (1868–1944) for more than twenty-five years had worked together in the name of pacifism and internationalism. By the time of the first CICI meeting in Geneva, the two collaborators were overseeing an entire portfolio of initiatives that were all prominently “international” in nature: the International Office of Bibliography; the International Archives; the International Library; the International Museum. It was as if the expanding world of information was held together from Brussels. And in a way it was. In 1920, the Belgian government had put a wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire at their disposal, and La Fontaine and Otlet finally got what they had wanted for a long time; everything under one roof. The Palais Mondial—Mundaneum was a fitting jewel in their international crown.

Utopian is the best word for some of their startlingly modern and innovative work on documentation and information. Perhaps all a bit too utopian for the liking of the League of Nations, even though it had sponsored Otlet and La Fontaine financially as well as morally. And while the Paris peace conference in 1919 decided that the headquarters of the League of Nations should be established in Geneva, Paul Otlet did his best to lobby for a move to Belgium. In effect, what Otlet really wanted was neither Geneva nor Brussels as the site for the League of Nations: he thought the only rational solution was to build a New City, one that was customized for all the new institutions that came with this truly international life.15 Switzerland was altogether the wrong choice: “few countries are less cosmopolitan,” he once quipped.16 It was not the first or the last time Otlet would promote the idea of a world city. Ten years later, he had changed his mind on Geneva and even considered it as a possible site for his and Le Corbusier’s grandiose (but ultimately doomed) vision of a cité mondiale. Then, to add insult to injury, Jules Destrée became the Belgian CICI representative and Curie’s partner in the subcommittee on bibliography, an assignment tailor-made for Otlet. The Belgian visionaries were sidestepped on almost all counts.

But there was one area where La Fontaine and Otlet exerted crucial influence on the work of the CICI. Among all their internationalist initiatives undertaken during almost fifty years of collaboration, none was more important than bibliography. The essence of the universe of information and, most crucially, the antidote to the challenges of modern science, bibliography was also a matter of national pride. In 1895, the Belgian government created the Office international de bibliographie (OIB), “an institution that could shortly become the principal organ for the intellectual life of peoples.”17 Not quite, perhaps, even if La Fontaine and Otlet a few days later hosted the first Conférence international de bibliographie in Brussels, the aim of which was to set in motion the project of a universal bibliography.

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