428 J.-A. PEMBERTON
France in matters of culture’ and accused it of ‘trying to guard acquired
positions, in particular the Institute,’ concerned him, especially because
the war had seen a reduction of the ‘power and prestige’ of France.^3
More generally, Mayoux was concerned that the acceptance at San
Francisco that there was a place for ‘culture seemed above all a conces-
sion to old European habits.’^4 As a result, in the period between the
CAME meeting of July 1945 and the London Conference of November
that year, Mayoux expended all his efforts in order to secure the IIIC’s
future and promote the cause of culture.^5
In August, Mayoux sent a letter to Zimmern who was at that stage the
secretary of CAME as well as an advisor to the British Ministry of Education.
In that letter, Mayoux associated the maintenance of the IIIC with the flour-
ishing of a métapolitque conducive to international cooperation. Mayoux
informed Zimmern of what he saw as ‘one of the possible points of friction’
between the Anglo-American project on the one hand, and the French pro-
ject on the other, stating that this possible point of friction was
linked to the ‘ideological’ question. The care to very strongly maintain the
cultural side and to not let it be drowned by ‘education,’ the care, at the
very moment when the great nationalisms affirm themselves on the polit-
ical plane much more strongly than they did in 1919, to go much further
on our terrain than the Charter of San Francisco and to recommence forg-
ing a new and universal esprit is not separable from our preoccupation of
maintaining the Institute.^6Renoliet records that in a letter sent to Georges Bidault the minister
of foreign affairs in the Provisional Government of the French Republic
in September 1945, Mayoux pointed out that the IIIC had covered
‘all the directions indicated in recent projects, Anglo-Saxon or others,’
adding that if its work was not well known it was because it lacked the
(^5) Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 169–71. See also Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of
UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 227. CAME was dissolved in December 31,
1945, after a final formal meeting with the executive bureau of UNESCO.
(^6) Jean-Jacques Mayoux, 1945, quoted in Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 172. For
Mayoux’s notion of a métapolitque see Jean Jacques Mayoux, ‘Conjoncture,’ Coopération
Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 3–4 (1946): i–iii.
(^3) Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 169–70.
(^4) Jean-Jaques Mayoux, ‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’
Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 1–2 (1946): i–xxiii, iii.