The Davos project coincided with warming international relations,[4] particularly between France and the Weimar Republic (Germany) after the Locarno Pact of 1925.

[5] The French intelligentsia wholeheartedly participated in projects of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, but the Germans, who were excluded from it by the Treaty of Versailles, instead founded the Deutsch-französische Gesellschaft (DFG, "German-French Society").

[7] A committee made up of local and visiting academics was assembled under the chairmanship of Dr Paul Müller (instigator of the Spengler coup in 1923), the sociologist Gottfried Salomon (1892 – 1964), president of the Frankfurt DFG, and Erhard Branger (1881 – 1958), mayor of Davos, who made it their mission to invite élite European intellectuals to Davos for weeks of work and exchange of ideas.

For four consecutive years, between 1928 and 1931, the committee convened a large number of important intellectuals,[8] mainly German and French, for conferences (in both languages) lasting three weeks at the end of winter.

Adolf Hitler's ascension and granting of absolute power on 30 January 1933, led to the exile of many German intellectuals and put an end to Franco-German co-operation in science, which made it impossible to continue the conferences.