ABSTRACT
A recent statistical study has found the normaliens of the Third Republic to have originated in Paris and the "free-thinking, industrializing, and literate East" of France as opposed to the "culturally retrograde" Catholic West or heavily Catholic cities. Middle-class professional in social background, the Republic's normaliens seem to have been the products almost exclusively of secular education. Based, then, on a social, geographical and educational profile which appears to have been compiled within the theoretical framework of the two Frances, the normalien of the Third Republic emerges as a non-Catholic, if not incipiently anti-clerical, personality. The path traveled by young men during the century's first decade between familial Catholicism and Sillon is illuminated somewhat by François Mauriac, who remembers his encounter with the movement in 1905 as the first time that he confronted critically the faith in which he had been raised.
