The Abbaye de Créteil or Abbaye group (in French : Groupe de l'Abbaye) was an utopian, artitstic and literary community founded in 1907. It was named after the Créteil abbey, as most gatherings took place in that suburb of Paris.
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The Abbaye de Créteilgroup was a phalanstère, a utopian community, founded in the fall of 1906 by the poets Georges Duhamel and Charles Vildrac. The inspiration for its formation was the Abbaye de Thélème, a fictional creation by Rabelais in his novel Gargantua. It was closed down by its members early in 1908.
Duhamel and Vildrac settled in Créteil, just to the southeast of Paris, in a house in a park-like setting along the Marne River. Their aim was to establish a place of freedom and friendship conducive to artistic and literary creativity.
Writers of the era such as René Arcos, Henri-Martin Barzun and Alexandre Mercereau) and the painter Albert Gleizes joined with them in their effort. Henri-Martin Barzun (father of the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun) was a financial contributor to his friends at the Abbaye de Créteil.
The group had the concrete goal of creating a publishing house that would bring in sufficient income to support the Abbaye. The typographer Lucien Linard, a friend of Albert Gleizes, furnished the printing press. From January 1907 through January 1908, some twenty books were published by the Abbaye.
Many different artists visited the community and participated to its project : the poet Pierre Jean Jouve, the musician Albert Doyen, the illustrator Berthold Mahn, the painter Henri Doucet, Léon Balzagette, who had translated American poet Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass into French, or the writer Jules Romains, founder of unanimism, for example.
The Abbaye attracted much interest but not much revenue and its young members found themselves forced to close their beloved Abbaye on January 28, 1908. Its publishing house survived for a while and the friends continued to get together every month for a dîner des copains (dinner of pals).
This entry is based on a translation of the entry to the Abbaye de Créteil in the French Wikipedia (on 22 October 2007)