Fantastic realism (literature)
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Fantastic Realism (Réalisme fantastique) was a movement which had its hour of glory in the 1960s, and whose founding act was the publication of the book The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens), subtitled "Introduction to Fantastic Realism." Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels published the book in October 1959, and total French-language sales were about 2,000,000.
Jacques Bergier set himself up as intellectual heir to Charles Hoy Fort. Louis Pauwels would later be an editor of a review of an extremely different spirit, namely the Figaro magazine (magazine version of a popular newspaper).
The rapid, unexpected success of this book encouraged its authors to create a review entirely devoted to the same topic: Planète (The Planet).
Philosophers, sociologists and writers such as Mircea Eliade, Edgar Morin, Odile Passeron, Jean-Bruno Renard, Umberto Eco and Jean d'Ormesson considered this the leading phenomenon of the 1960s.
