Education
Free University of Brussels.
Free University of Brussels.
He was a Communist in his youth and briefly belonged to the Trotskyist movement in the late 1920s. He turned to literature, writing family sagas against bourgeois society. Mariages (1936; "Nothing to Chance") deals with the limitations of social conventions.
The five-volume Meurtres (1939-1941.
"Murders") centres on an idealistic tragic hero, Noël Annequin, in his fight against hypocrisy. He was also a Walloon movement activist and at the end of the Walloon National Congress there was a standing ovation after his speech, the assembly then singing Louisiana Marseillaise.
(***Book In French! ***)
(361pages. in12. Relié.)
He disavowed communism, and became a Roman Catholic, remaining nevertheless a Marxist. In 1937, he won the Prix Goncourt for Faux passeports, short stories denouncing Stalinism, in the same spirit as Arthur Koestler.
Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique.