Following the defeat of France in 1940, the Ecole Nationale des Cadres was set up at the Chateau d'Uriage, in the Alps above Grenoble, to train an elite drawn from the young intelligentsia as part of a larger effort to transform the nation. Some of the most imaginative and original guidelines for a French National Revolution under the Vichy government were formulated here.

Uriage soon became not only an avant-garde community, living in what it described as "the style of the twentieth century," but also an innovative and prestigious think-tank of the National Revolution, embodying many of the strengths and weaknesses of the ascendant French anti-liberal conservative revolutionaries.

In The Knight-Monks of Vichy France John Hellman describes the founding, operation, transformation, and demise of the school, details the institution's ideological and political struggles with other segments of French society, and deals with the remarkable rise of Uriage ideas and alumni in postwar France.

By focusing on the social, philosophical, and psychological concepts propounded by the staff of the school, Hellman has produced the first study that shows the Ecole Nationale des Cadres d'Uriage to have been an original educational and group experience which inspired French youth from very different backgrounds to abandon the liberal democratic tradition for a new political and social vision.

This book will be of particular interest to readers concerned with the intellectual life of modern France, modern religious thought and experience, fascism and the Vichy regime, changes in France in the prewar and postwar periods, and the "third way" communitarian political option in contemporary Europe.