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In 1948, Claude Panconi fatally shot his classmate, seventeen-year-old Alain Guyader, in the woods outside of Paris. The young assassin initially told police investigators that Guyader was a Nazi before abandoning his political alibi and blaming his favorite authors: Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. The ensuing scandal, known as "the J3 Affair," became a national obsession. It seemed, to contemporaries, to lay bare the moral corruption of a generation that had come of age during France's Dark Years (1940-1944), and, therefore, to portend ill for the country's future.

This is the first book to reconstruct and analyze Panconi's crime, its cultural consequences, and the social category that emerged from it: "the J3s." So-named for the wartime ration category for adolescents, these teenagers were neither delinquents in the traditional sense, nor bohemian rebels. Rather, they were middle-class kids of the postwar moment whose violent behaviors appeared to reenact the traumas of the Occupation. Drawing on a forgotten judicial archive and popular mid-century media, Ian Williams Curtis examines how the J3 Affair took shape in police interviews, psychiatric and psychoanalytic analyses, crime reporting, and literary and cinematic adaptation. In so doing, he tells a new story about French mentalities at a pivotal moment in the country's history.