In 2011, a controversy arose in Tunisia surrounding an interview in which Moncef Ben Salem (the current Tunisian Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research) dismissed the novelist Ali Douagi (1909-1949) and his interwar literary circle Taht Essour as a group of profligates and alcoholics who mock Islam and feed on maggots and cats. [1] Because of these comments and the mysterious circumstances under which the Nahdha Party candidate was promoted to full professor, Tunisian academics opposed his candidature to the post of Minister of Education. Inspired by this controversy, the recent debate over religion and secularism in Tunisia as well as Al Nahdha Party’s announced plan to reform Tunisian education by the “re-Arabization” and “re-Islamization” of the high school and university curriculum, this paper seeks to reexamine the portrait of Taht Essour writers and artists through the interwar satirical newspaper Al Shabab. This weekly newspaper was founded in the 1930s by Mahmoud Bayram Ettounsi, an Egyptian political exile of Tunisian ancestry who returned to live in Tunisia during the interwar period after being banned from Egypt by King Fouad and Queen Nazali. Even though Al Shabab ran for only two years, it is full of political cartoons, anecdotes and satirical articles which provide invaluable information on literary and artistic life in interwar French colonial Tunisia. While the first section of this paper sheds light on the lives of forgotten intellectuals, reporters, and politicians such as Maître Tahar Essafi, Maître Munthir Al Nooman, Beshir Forty, Abdelaziz Aroui, Zine al Abidine Essnoussi, Othman al Ka’ak, and Mohamed El Jaibi, the second examines the connections of these literary circles with the artistic and political movements existing in Tunisia, the Arab world, and Europe at the time. The third part investigates the circumstances under which Abou Kacem Chebbi came to be Tunisia’s national poet. This section unearths the lost story of a poetry tribute held on the second anniversary of Abou Kacem Chebbi’s death to which neither Chadhli Khaznadar nor Jaladdin al Naccache (the invited guest speakers and established poets at the time) showed up for political reasons. A particular emphasis will be laid in the conclusion on the social class issues and the historical ties (real or fictitious) connecting these avant-garde Tunisian writers, poets, journalists, and artists to the political movements which will emerge in postcolonial Tunisia, from the first years of independence until the 14 January 2011 Revolution.