Abstract
Abstract This article revisits André Gide's emblematically modernist novel, Les faux-monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters ), by reevaluating the importance and significance of the setting at the center of the narrative: the “pension Azaïs-Vedel,” a Protestant educational institution around which all the novel's characters—mostly adolescents—gravitate and all the subplots converge. It shows how Gide's choice of setting responded to the “quarrel of classicism,” which reconfigured the French literary field at the turn of the twentieth century, superimposing the political, the aesthetic, and the religious and connecting the question of literary form with that of the formation of French youth. The article also reassesses the survival of religion in twentieth-century French literature, and in particular the enduring religiosity inflecting both political modernity and modernist aesthetics.