The traditional image of nineteenth-century European students presents the liberal French revolutionary mounting the barricades or the romantic German drinking or dueling to protect his honor. Many of these images were deceptive, and historians in the last ten years have worked to find the true significance of the student subcultures in Europe, and the manner in which these students were socialized for their future roles in society. Robert J. Smith has argued that students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure drew progressive political lessons from their education, which contributed greatly to defining the characteristics not only of French education, but of the Third Republic itself. McLachlan and Rothblatt have demonstrated that when nineteenth-century students at Princeton or Oxford and Cambridge were dissatisfied with the official curriculum of those institutions they were quite capable of taking the initiative and establishing much of their own social and intellectual life. Konrad Jarausch has emphasized the role of voluntary student organizations in the neutralization of liberal impulses in German higher education, and has stressed the importance of student subculture for the shift from left-wing to right-wing nationalism in Germany. In general, Jarausch has pointed out the importance of traditional student organizations, which “socialize the future elite toward adult roles and form a safety valve for sporadic outbursts of violence, sexual license, etc.”