Exclusive pictures of "Educating for Peace: 100 Years of Ecolint"
The affection of students for Paul Dupuy, aged 81 when this photo was taken in 1937 (in the double courtyard formed by the Vieille Maison and Grand Bâtiment buildings), is evident in this scene. Its easygoing informality – witness the left hand of the young woman to the right of Dupuy, resting on his shoulder – is all the more remarkable when one bears in mind his distinction as a historical figure, who as a prominent faculty member of Paris’ famous École normale supérieure had rubbed shoulders with Louis Pasteur.
Dupuy had also played a significant role in defending the Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus against unfounded and malicious accusations of treason in the late 1890s, in close collaboration with Jean Jaurès and lieutenant-colonel Georges Picquart (the protagonist of Robert Harris’ novel An Officer and a Spy, on which Roman Polanski’s film with the same title was based).
In Ecolint – A History of the International School of Geneva (2014), Hamayed and de Wilde describe Dupuy as “an Ecolint legend” who was “a great teacher, but he was also a manager’s nightmare and was keen to avoid pedagogical discussions, preferring to get on with the job of teaching”. In the words of his colleague Florence Fake (one of Ecolint’s first three teachers): “M. Dupuy kept aloof. He was successful with his pupils and had no interest in principles of pedagogy. Either you understood children and loved the subject you had to teach or you did not.”
The eminent Dutch/US economist Erik Thorbecke, who joined Ecolint as a student in 1939, remembers Dupuy habitually poring over one scholarly book or another as wandered around the campus – instead of a smartphone screen, as is usually the case today, he adds wryly.
The prominent Swiss philosopher Jeanne Hersch, who for years taught alongside Dupuy in Ecolint, wrote: “M. Dupuy aimait la vérité. Ce n’était pas pour lui une vertu, mais un instinct passionné, un besoin vital de propreté. (…) L’amour de la vérité, lorsqu’il est ainsi ardent jusqu’à la minutie, empêche toujours le fanatisme, cette pauvreté du cœur, de sacrifier l’homme à quelque évidence prétendue. (...) Ainsi l’amour de l’homme n’était pas pour lui une faiblesse intellectuelle, ni l’amour de la vérité une dureté du cœur.” Dupuy continued to teach dynamically and with undiminished enthusiasm in Ecolint until 1940, when he retired definitively at the age of 84.
(Photo credit: Ecolint Archives)