Perhaps nowhere but in France, with its love of authoritarian academies and received rules for learning, could Bourbaki have arisen. It began as a club, founded in the unsettled wake of World War I by Szolem Mandelbrot and a handful of other insouciant young mathematicians looking for a way to rebuild French mathematics. The vicious demographics of war had left an age gap between university professors and students, disrupting the tradition of academic continuity, and these brilliant young men set out to establish new foundations for the practice of mathematics.
