ABSTRACT
In Europe between the First and Second World Wars political leaders asserted the importance of involving ‘youth’ more centrally in urban politics. This was not a new project by any means. It had emerged as a topic for discussion most recently in the late nineteenth century, but the First World War acted as the catalyst for a still more substantive reconsideration of this relationship. Factions dissatisfied with the post-war order, in particular, strove to refashion the domestic political scene and in this process they often identified the young as having a special role to play. In the early post-war years, for example, Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia invested youth with new importance in the project of building the ‘new’ Soviet man and woman and Italian Fascists set about constructing a social ‘revolution’ based on youth.1 The harnessing of qualities assumed to be inherent in youth for the good of party and society was not only observable at such extremes, however. Even in countries characterized by greater stability in the 1920s and 1930s such as England and France (with which this chapter is primarily concerned), the need to bind the young into more prominent political roles was recognized and acted upon across the ideological spectrum by those who identified ‘youth’ as a force capable of overturning or revitalizing decadent domestic politics.
