| Raymond Abellio | |
| Awards: | Prix Sainte-Beuve (1946) Prix des Deux Magots (1980) |
| Birth Name: | Georges Soulès |
| Birth Date: | 1907 11, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Toulouse, France |
| Death Place: | Nice, France |
| Resting Place: | Cimetière d'Auteuil, Paris, France |
| Occupation: | Novelist, essayist, philosopher |
| Education: | École Polytechnique |
Georges Soulès (11 November 1907 – 26 August 1986), known by his pen name Raymond Abellio, was a French writer.[1]
Abellio was born in Toulouse and attended courses at the École Polytechnique. He later joined the X-Crise Group.[2] He advocated far-left ideas, but like many other technocrats, he joined the Vichy regime during the Second World War and became in 1942 secretary general of Eugène Deloncle's far-right Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR) party.[3] He then participated in Marcel Déat's attempt of creating a unified Collaborationist party. In April and September 1943 he participated in the Days of the Mont-Dore, an assembly of collaborationist personalities under the patronage of Philippe Pétain.[4] After the Liberation, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in absentia for Collaborationism, and escaped to Switzerland. However, he was pardoned in 1952 and went on to start a literary career.
Besides his literary career, under the influence of Pierre de Combas, he developed an interest in esoterism, and especially astrology. He was also interested in the possibility of a secret numerical code in the Bible, a subject that he developed in La Bible, document chiffré in 1950, and later in Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques, in 1984. He proposed in particular that the number of the beast, 666, was the key number of life, a manifestation of the holy trinity on all possible levels, material, animist and spiritual. He has also written on the philosophy of rugby football.[5]
Beginning in 1974 he edited the Recherches avancées book series for Fayard.