The Compagnons de France was a Vichy-era youth organization, founded in the summer of 1940 and dissolved in January 1944. Its membership was never numerous, a few tens of thousands at most, but it was no less significant for all that. It was the carrier of a Kulturkritik that blamed France’s ills on parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and a market-oriented individualism, and it had antidotes to propose: authority, faith, community. Vichy tapped into such grass-roots initiatives, mobilizing and turning them to its purposes. As the Vichy dictatorship descended into collaborationist squalor, however, a growing number of Compagnons turned away, opting instead for the Resistance. Yet, the Resistance they embraced, Giraudisme, did not require them to make too sharp a break with their Vichy past. The Vichy experiment, it was acknowledged, had not worked out, but it had been worth a try, and Pétain himself remained worthy of admiration for having made a good faith effort. The Liberation brought the entire Compagnon episode to close, of course, but not altogether for the young people of the war years still had decades of life ahead of them, and not all forgot the ideals that once fired them up. The authoritarianism of the Compagnon creed was set aside but not so its commitments to faith and community. These found expression in the postwar activities of ex-Compagnons: in the folk music of the Compagnons de la chanson, in the community organizing of La Vie nouvelle, and in the evolving militancy of the philosopher Maurice Clavel.