The study draws on Pierre Bourdieu's literary field theory and recent French historiography on intellectualism to submit the literary field in France in the decade after the First World War to as exhaustive an analysis as possible. The major debates of this period on national and/or international commitment, Catholicism, and the generation conflict collide with the notion of literary autonomy gaining greater momentum in the course of the 1920s. At the heart of these controversies are authors such as Jacques Rivière, André Gide, Philippe Soupault, Jean Cocteau, and Jacques Maritain.