ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that the elite youth of pre-war France may be approached empirically, as a discrete generation-unit, through comparing a group-biography of young Parisians who clearly belonged to that unit with an analysis of the more well-known intellectuals with whom it is generally associated. Accepting Karl Mannheim's definition of a generation as consisting of "youth experiencing the same concrete historical conditions", it focuses primarily on Agathon's 1912 enquete and the normalien talas of 1905-14 whom Massis and de Tarde uncovered. The chapter talks about the three Catholic intellectuals whom scholars most often associate with France's pre-war youth- Charles Péguy, Jacques Maritain, and Ernest Psichari. The Dreyfus Affair offered Peguy an opportunity to put his ideals into practice. He identified passionately with the Jewish captain's cause, and now a disciple both of Jaurès and Lucien Herr, he became a leader of the pro-Dreyfus forces in the street-battles which erupted periodically in the Latin Quarter between 1897 and 1899.
