The Boundaries of Politicisation

Abstract

This article examines from a comparative perspective German and French students’ attitudes to politics and their politicisation between 1880 and 1914. The aim is to understand how they came to form a social group. Focusing on student organisations, it analyses their political practices as factors in their integration into the political and social order. I argue that students tried to distance themselves from active political engagement, although the boundaries of this phenomenon always remained vague and fluctuating. The integration of students into the established order was similar in France and Germany. However, students’ concrete possibilities for political action and therefore their politicisation were unequal because of the different forms that democratization took in the two countries.