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PARTISAN REVIEW
Abellio's biographical background. His real name is Georges Soules.
He was a student at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale,
the best school in France and one where nonsense is hardly encouraged.
But he is also a graduate of the two main world historical schools of
our time. He apparently took part in the Spanish war as a Communist
and came back from it a Trotskyist with a solid hatred of the Stalinist
hierarchy. In 1940 he became a fascist of the fanatic cagoulard-techno–
cratic-synarchist variety. Finally, disappointed with the shabbiness of
French fascism (and presumably also with its impending defeat) during
the last part of the war, he founded a "socialist revolutionary" movement
of his own. Having fled from France after the liberation he now lives
in Belgium as an exile.
Such a succession of choices that are nothing if not extreme is cer–
tainly impressive. Their intellectual outcome is "prophecy." Abellio's
prophetism, one might add, signifies little else than a perverse refusal
to shed anything of his past, an obstinate attempt to prove that he was
right all the way.
It would surely be incongruous, having talked about Abellio, not
to say something about Camus' latest works, the play
Les Justes
and
Actuelles
a collection of editorials written in
Combat
from 1944 to 1947
plus a few topical articles published after the author of
The Plague
had given up militant journalism.
Mter all is said about the weakness of
Les Justes
as a play, it remains
a piece of literary work that commands respect, and a stage production
that is moving if not really dramatic. In any case it has been running
for
six
solid months in spite of the lukewarm reception it got from the
critics.
As you know by now,
Les Justes
is a play about the assassination
of the Grand Duke Serge by the socialist revolutionary Kalyaev, or
rather about Kalyaev's refusal in spite of the terrific pressure of the
conspiracy to throw the bomb the first time because the Grand Duke's
children were in the carriage (Hence the remark of some spectators:
"Five acts about whether or not one should kill little children"). It con–
sists of five barely connected scenes about what kind of murderer one
should be--once murder has become imperative-a delicate and pas–
sionate one, or a fanatic and ruthless one.
What made the Parisians applaud
Les Justes
and burst into tears at
some of its scenes was not the debate about the Revolution which is
present only in a few sketchy sentences, but the reminder of the Re–
sistance which it obviously contains. Those years of terror and revolt
are not forgotten in France. There were, in those days, people who went
