In 1970, Alexandre Grothendieck learned that about 5% of IHES operating funds were from the French Ministry of Defense. His colleagues were not willing to end this military cooperation, and so, he resigned his professorship. Later that year, in Montreal, he co-founded Survivre et Vivre, an organization and journal whose purpose was, as he put it,
…the struggle for the survival of the human species, and even of life itself, threatened by the growing ecological imbalance caused by the indiscriminate use of science and technology and by suicidal social mechanisms, and also threatened by conflicts related to the proliferation of military devices and arms industries.
The circumstances of his resignation are explained in an article he wrote in the 6th volume of Survivre et Vivre, which is available here. For your convenience, I’m linking an English translation of Grothendieck’s article “How I Became a Militant” from Volume 6 here.
