The venue for the summit meetings was the Château de Rambouillet near Paris.

[2] This summit, and the others which would follow, were not meant to be linked formally with wider international institutions; and in fact, a kind of frustrated rebellion against the stiff formality of other international meetings was an element in the genesis of cooperation between France's president and West Germany's chancellor as they conceived the first summit of the G6.

It was important to note that each of them had attained office the previous year due to unforeseeable circumstances.

As a practical matter, the summit was also conceived as an opportunity for its members to give each other mutual encouragement in the face of difficult economic decisions.

[3] Rambouillet had no easy answers to what was then the most serious recession since the 1930s; but the main themes of what would later become known as the "1st G7/G8 summit" will remain for decades on the world's agenda—avoiding protectionism, energy dependency and boosting growth.