The political involvement of scientific circles is a phenomenon of the 1930s. The Joliots were the inheritors of the commitments made by their elders, by their teachers -Jean Perrin, Marie Curie, Georges Urbain, Paul Langevin - for whom the 6 February 1934 was crucial and they pursued the positions and accepted the responsibilities adopted by their predecessors, continuing their activities for a 'policy for science'. The Popular Front made it possible for these aspirations to be embedded in government policy, of which Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie were at once the symbols and the flagbearers. It was within the logic of these developments that, at the dawn of the war, Frederic Joliot, obsessed by the research done on nuclear chain reactions, dedicated himself in parallel to the mobilisation of scientists in France and the organisation of the allied scientific community.
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