500
VICTOR BROMBERT
and some of the finest-testify to this ferment and describe the
formation of these groups which so often meant the death of
individual talent, of these bohemian
cenacles
of artists, journal–
ists and failures with their ambitions and illusions: Frederic
Moreau and his friends in
L'Education sentimentale;
the group
centering around the journal
"Scandale"
in the Goncourts'
Charles Demailly;
the circle of Coriolis, the self-destructive
painter in
Manette Salomon;
the youthful and exalted group
of young artists dedicated to beauty and suffering in Zola's
L'Oeuvre;
the utopian members of the "Union Tolstoi" in
Bourget's
L'Etape;
the young men from Lorraine, Sturel's up–
rooted fellow students in Barres'
Les Deracines.
Similiar groups
of artists and intellectuals continue to people the novels of the
twentieth century: the
"groupe des huit"
in Martin du Gard's
early novel
Devenir;
the militant Dreyfusard group of the
"Semeurs" in
Jean Barois;
the young "Normaliens" of the Rue
d'UIm in Jules Romains'
Hommes de bonne volonte;
the anti–
bourgeois in search of revolutionary justifications in Paul
Nizan's
Conspiration;
the more amenable young bohemians who
gather in the
Cour de Rohan
in Andre Charnson's
La Neige et
la Ileur;
the frustrated post-war existentialist intellectuals in
Simone de Beauvoir's
Les Mandarins;
the less engaging young
intellectuals style-Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Jean Louis Curtis'
ironic novel,
Les Justes Causes.
These "groups"-their evolution
during the last hundred years, the changing problems they face,
the light they cast on the intellectual and moral preoccupations
of successive generations-deserve a serious study.
Finally, the growing prestige of the Universities, and the
emergence (especially during the Third Republic) of a
lonc–
tionnarisme universitaire
holding out the promise of a stable
though mediocre career, attracting many young men of modest
background, created a social phenomenon with far-reaching
consequences. The near-obsessive struggle for
.a
diploma became
a recognized malady. A growing army of
licencies,
frequently
frustrated in their ambitions, developed side by side with an
