Jean-Louis Etienne, godfather of the 2023-2024 cohort of Fellows

Physician, explorer and writer, the great Jean-Louis Etienne has honored us this year with the title of Godfather for our 2023-2024 Research Fellows.

Jean-Louis Etienne was able to meet the Fellows of the Institute on October 09, 2023, at the official presentation ceremony featuring the new Fellows, during which he gave a very personal, inspiring and instructive discourse, which you can find at the bottom of this page.

Also present were our President Bettina Laville, and IAS's partner universities: CNRS, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, EHESS, EPHE-PSL, ENS, FMSH, Inalco, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Sorbonne Université, Université Gustave Eiffel, Université Paris Cité, Université Paris-Nanterre and Université Paris-Saclay. The City of Paris was represented by Marie-Christine Lemardeley, Deputy Minister for Higher Education, Research and Student Life.

Discourse by Jean-Louis Etienne, godfather of the 2023-2024 cohort of fellows

Thank you, Bettina, madame la Présidente, for this opportunity to be the godfather of this new class of Fellows, recognised worldwide in the humanities and social sciences. It's a real honour for me.

Dear Fellows, you have completed a brilliant course of study and your academic curriculum meets the requirements of the prestigious Institut d'Études Avancées de Paris, for which I congratulate you with all due respect.

I am all the more grateful for the honour of being your sponsor, as my own background is very different from that of your brilliant studies.

In a few words, I started my apprenticeship as a metalworker at the age of 14. This apprenticeship was a way for me to regain my interest in school and to gain confidence for new ambitions. After graduating in mathematics, I went on to study medicine and became an intern in surgery, where I rediscovered my passion for the practical side of medicine. I loved the atmosphere of the operating theatre, the intensity of the action, the concentration under the surgical lighting.

I was on a constructive and exciting hospital career path, but a deep-seated desire resurfaced, born of my childhood in the countryside, where I spent time in nature, inventing challenges for myself, virtual expeditions that fed my childhood dreams, willingly at the edge of the world.

As a surgical trainee, I offered my medical skills to the expedition service, which allowed me to take part in some great adventures: the round-the-world yacht race, the north face of Everest, expeditions to Patagonia and Greenland, the crossing of Antarctica by dog sled as part of an international team, and many others.... until, at the age of 40, I decided to embark on a personal adventure, to reach the North Pole alone, an ambition whose challenge I had underestimated.

After 63 days of walking on a chaotic and dangerous ice floe, in bitter cold and immense loneliness (in 1986 there was no GPS and no telephone), I reached the Earth's axis of rotation. There's nothing at the North Pole, because the pack ice is constantly drifting and renewing itself.

Standing on this intangible point where the meridians of all countries meet, happy and fulfilled after this commitment to the end of myself, I wrote in my logbook: "From now on I will imagine and organise my own expeditions. From now on I will make my dreams come true and share them with others".

I then left the practice of medicine to devote myself to organising polar expeditions.

From this personal journey and from all the expeditions I've done, I've learnt several lessons that I'd like to share with you.

Firstly, I can assure you that we don't push our limits, we discover ourselves. We're capable of things we don't even know we're capable of until we're confronted with them.

You have a brilliant career ahead of you, and faced with the range of opportunities that lie ahead, you must allow yourself the audacity to abandon what you've acquired for new explorations. Experience enriches your toolbox for life.

Don't hesitate to cultivate your aspirations - an aspiration as a perspective, a horizon, a recurring, deep-seated desire, a form of biological anchoring that needs to be nurtured. Desire is a driving force for personal fulfilment. But desire and dreams are not synonymous with ease. They require time, work and perseverance.

Daring means stretching your imagination beyond certainties.

An extraordinary project is not unrealistic, it's only beyond the limits where the expert will accompany you. You have to move forward with all your senses open to capture everything that can nourish and enrich it.

If you do this part of the journey, life will do the rest for you. That's how chance organises itself.

As far as I can see, looking back over my life, I realise that all my crucial decisions have been guided by a compelling need to give free rein to my desires, my ideas. You're only as good and efficient as the path you choose.

I've given myself the freedom to invent my life.

And this freedom doesn't belong to others, it belongs to oneself, to what one is capable of imposing on oneself. In moments of doubt, of discouragement, to bring the dream to the surface, to resist the temptation to give up.

Today, it is clear to everyone that mankind, that super-talented mutant of creation, is gradually reaching the limits of the carbon civilisation it has created. Since the invention of the steam engine, powered by the combustion of coal, our civilisation has been developing with talent. This great invention was to be rapidly developed for transport and to relieve human drudgery.

In the space of a century, we have taken possession of spaces and species in an astonishing acceleration of the massive exploitation of fossil resources, both for energy and petrochemicals, and to what end?

The decarbonisation project we are undertaking now is a colossal, global undertaking. We are aware of the situation and have the intelligence to find solutions. The solutions are both behavioural and technological.

Behavioural in the choices we make as citizens, constructive sobriety in the three elements that define our lives - energy, water and food - and technological in the production and storage of decarbonised energy.

It's up to all of us to be courageous and tolerant enough to implement them. Each of us must take action in our own sphere of influence, and each of us must play an active role as investors in the solution.

At a time when caricatured, even extremist, environmental protest takes precedence over common sense, telling people that we need a paradigm shift is a sure way to lose their understanding and support. Putting ourselves at the service of humanity means, above all, creating an educational discourse, cultivating the adage of Jean Jaurès in his 1903 speech to young people: "Embrace the ideal, but understand reality".

Dear Fellows, you represent an elite from every corner of the world, cultivated and agile of mind, it's time to restore a positivism of the unknown, so be explorers, committed explorers of your time to be the actors of tomorrow's world.