By the early 1950s, Boulez became known for his controversial and outspoken statements, his notorious snipes at non-serial but otherwise progressive contemporaries, creating a rift that divided French composers into competing factions. Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana, as well as others represented not only at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen but also the Warsaw Autumn Festival as leading figures in French contemporary music, found themselves excluded from the Concerts du Domaine musical and subject to what has been called the Boulezian ‘aesthetic of refusal’. Contextualising these issues, this chapter considers Jolivet’s influence on the young Boulez, their subsequent rupture in the very public affaire de scandale that followed and Boulez’s later reconciliations. Compositional common denominators linking particular works of Ohana and Dutilleux with Boulez are also explored in relation to Debussy as well as non-serial dodecaphonic techniques and the style incantatoire to reveal closer aesthetic links than any may have wished to admit.