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Because it was at the top of a society that had already started the process of democratization and conversion to republican ideals, Parisian high society, the elite of the French aristocracy, had to undergo an early challenge of its positions. However, at the end of the 19th century, it was still powerful and still embodied a rich social and cultural ideal. The Great War, the break in the history of the former elites, a cutoff date signaling ‘the end of a world’ and the beginning of a new social order, seems to have affected the vitality of the group only physically. The 1920s continued the collective euphoria of the Belle Epoque that the First World War had merely interrupted. It wasn’t until the late 1930s that this world was overwhelmed on the political and ideological levels, weakened on the economic level and tarnished in the eyes of the French by the rise of the new elites, bourgeois and republican. So the slow decline of the former elites, forecasted and widely fantasized since the French revolution, took shape in the between-war period but didn’t occur until after 1945.