The 1st G6 summit took place on 15–17 November 1975, in Rambouillet, France. The venue for the summit meetings was the Château de Rambouillet near Paris. The Group of Six (G6) was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. 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.