«Gang Spirit» versus the Humanistic Ideal: the 1930s in France

Abstract

jules Romains’s work Les hommes de bonne volonté deals with an imaginary that exemplified, in part, the mentality of a sector of French youth betrayed by the political class and overrun by social and cultural mass effect. «Gang spirit» refers to the leagues, pseudo-military groups, on both the far right and the far left, that appeared in France during the latter years of the twentieth decade. Alongside these «gangs», humanist concerns for what the European ideal should stand for gained a foothold in the face of fears about the growing Nazism movement in Germany and fascism in Italy. years later, in the middle of the Second World War, this humanistic discourse would find one of its greatest exponents in writer Albert Camus and his Lettres à un ami allemand. Both texts refer to an omnipresent social discourse in 1930s French society, and enable us to understand the collaborationist mentality of that era.