Introduction

Agathon's newspaper survey or enquete of the new youth, although the most celebrated, was neither the first nor the last of the genre to appear between 1912 and 1914. In 1910, Massis and de Tarde had first introduced themselves, or rather, "Agathon", to the public by attacking the so-called "new Sorbonne" in LOpinion. Recent reforms in secondary and higher education, they had proclaimed, threatened the time-honored place which the classics had always held in France, and thereby also threatened the nation's moral health and political future. Agathon's assault on the Sorbonne, with its implicit nationalism and defense of the "ancients" against the "moderns", had provoked a predictable reaction in Paris' intellectual community. Left-wing politicians, liberal academics, and former Dreyfusards such as Jaures, Charles Seignobos and Gustave Lanson defended the reforms, as did their principle architect, the great historian Ernest Lavisse, in a letter to the Journal des Debats.