Raymond Abellio Explained

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]

Life

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.

Works

Notes and References

  1. https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb118879800 BnF
  2. Book: Keith Aspley. Keith Aspley. Historical Dictionary of Surrealism. 7 November 2016. 2010. Scarecrow Press. 9780810858473.
  3. Mark Sedgwick erratum to Against the Modern World Oxford University Press, 2004 Web site: Archived copy . 2008-05-17 . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20090405074052/http://www1.aucegypt.edu/faculty/sedgwick/trad/book/errata.html . 2009-04-05 .
  4. Antonin Cohen, Vers la Révolution Communautaire, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine n°51 (2004)
  5. R. ABELLIO, « Le rugby et la maîtrise du temps », Cahiers Raymond Abellio, novembre 1983, p. 75-76