An Enlightenment historian keeps Geneva's postwar debating society alive at 80
Michel Porret, a Geneva historian of 18th-century criminal justice, has chaired the Rencontres internationales de Genève since 2015. The series opens its 80th-anniversary edition on Tuesday, 22 September.
Michel Porret, a professor at the University of Geneva known for his work on crime and justice in the Age of Enlightenment, presides over the Rencontres internationales de Genève (RIG), a series of public intellectual gatherings founded in 1945. According to Le Temps, the 80th edition opens on Tuesday 22 September.
The RIG were launched by the advertising figure Emile Bercher, quickly backed by the university's then-rector Antony Babel and by public figures including the conductor Ernest Ansermet, Le Temps reports. The original ambition, in the ruins of the Second World War, was to help repair Europe by bringing leading intellectual figures together to exchange ideas, positioning Geneva as a stronghold of critical humanism.
Le Temps portrays Porret, who has chaired the RIG since 2015, as a man built for the role: it describes him receiving visitors in the Freudian half-light of his salon, recalling an adolescence spent in revolt against a tyrannical, violent baker father and against a school where he never found his place. The paper likens his bearing to Cyrano de Bergerac — an idealist's gaze, a stormy brow, the shoulders of a musketeer never entirely tamed.
No further detail on the programme of this year's edition was included in the material available.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
