This was the first international meeting for unclassified research worldwide on X-ray lasers. There were 86 participants from 10 countries. It was organized most perfectly in the French Alps just before the end of the skiing season by Pierre Jaegle (Universite Paris-Sud, Orsay) who himself may be considered as one of the first, in the field of X-ray lasers. Jeagle et al. published, in 1971, a paper on the extraordinary increase of the 117 angstrom aluminium lines when a target was irradiated by laser and a comparison with cases emitted from different volumes. His result was highlighted in 1973 by Benjamin Lax and Art Guenther (1974): ‘The most definitive evidence of non-equilibrium population of excited atomic states in a laser-produced plasma was obtained by Jaegle et al. at the University of Paris in Orsay’.