By the Libre-Pensée romande (Switzerland)
Mussolini, doctor Honoris causa IN LAUSANNE
While the city of Lausanne was on several occasions the stage, from certain historical points of view, for the preparation and signing of major international peace treaties, the University of its canton is also associated with the disturbing and unfortunate award of a real Doctorate Honoris Causa (DHC) to Benito Mussolini in 1937!
Keeping its distance from the world in its own way, in those very troubled times leading up to the Second World War, Switzerland and some of its cantons were confronted with the pro-fascist sympathies of some of their elites and some of their populations. This affection would manifest itself in other events in the public arena before the Second World War.
And yes, it’s not widely known – time and oblivion do their work here, as they do everywhere – but Mussolini was indeed honoured with a DHC at the University of Lausanne for his ‘original contributions’ (sic) to thinking on social organisation and order! Would such an honorary title still be awarded to this type of person in Switzerland and in Lausanne today? Surely not, and that’s just as well!
aT LAST, a colloquium to address this aberration
After periodic requests by various active and critical forces over the past fifty years to revisit the issue, the last of which was in 2020, the University of Lausanne is organising an international colloquium on the subject. It is clear that this historical reality is not a trivial blunder, but a very bad episode in Swiss, international and European academic history. It honours a figure whose theories were to set the world on edge, along with other equally evil figures in the alliances of the Axis powers of the time. Other universities, such as Brussels University in 1941, closed their doors temporarily to avoid having to comply with the supervision of the Nazi occupiers.
The nauseating ashes of these abjections and totalitarian theories are still latent. They may even be tending to revive, with the return of acts and ideas propagated to organise societies under the sway of ‘strong men’, imbued with their narcissistic inclinations and aiming in the long term at the destruction of democracies under their exclusive ideological rule.
Consequently, the Libre Pensée romande, through its networks with various European associations officially recognized by the European institutions, is launching an appeal for researchers from European universities, historians, political scientists and other scientists in the social sciences, ethics and philosophy, as well as critical and lucid personalities in the history of the world and its future, to register and join this conference on 7 and 8 November 2024 in Lausanne.
The Libre Pensée in French-speaking Switzerland is all the more encouraged by the presence of one of its former members, Claude Cantini, now very old and enjoying a well-deserved retirement, a member of the former Vaud cantonal section of the Libre Pensée in Switzerland, who was one of the public critics of this Doctorate Honoris Causa in the 1970s and 1980s through his quality publications and as a self-taught historian. He strongly criticised the pro-fascist attitudes of the time in Switzerland.
It’s up to each and every one of us to make our own analysis and opinion on this historical reality.
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