One of the questions that led me to study French fascist intellectuals in the 1930s (in retrospect, a naive question) was this: how could such sensitive, intelligent men, men steeped in the riches of European literature, become fascists? For literary intellectuals like Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand .Celine, Abel Bonnard, Lucien Rebatet, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, and Bertrand de Jouvenel were sensitive, intelligent, literate men. One must not forget that a good many intellectuals were attracted to fascism in the 1930s-from William Butler Yeats to Ezra Pound to Martin Heidegger.1 Not all fascists were brutal, pathological SS men. These existed, but there were other types as well: academics, novelists, poets, literary critics, and philosophers who were attracted to fascism by the spiritual revolution promised. Nor were university students exempt from its appeal, especially in Germany. As George Lichtheim (who was there) has written, it is a myth that the Nazi movement represented only 'the mob.' It had conquered the universities before triumphed over society.2 In France in the 1930s the radical Right had a host of followers in the Latin Quarter-the Jeunesses patriotes, the Action franCaise, the Croix de Feu and other fascist or semifascist movements forming sizable youth auxiliaries from student recruits.3