A Belgian francophone writer, literary critic and journalist, born in Liège into a Catholic petit-bourgeois background and who died in Marly-le-Roi in France. After a turbulent, resolutely non-conformist childhood, he made a name for himself in 1931 with the publication of Handji ou la femme illusion, a novel which recounts the lives of soldiers on the Russian front during the First World War. This oeuvre led him to be considered as the creator of a new literary genre, in other words magic realism, in which reality and the invisible world are brought together. Over the course of the Second World War he founded the daily Le Nouveau Journal and advocated a collaboration policy with the Nazi occupier. Arrested and sentenced to death in 1945, a punishment commuted to exile, he established himself in the Paris region without for all that abandoning his extreme rightwing convictions (essays and articles in the weekly Rivarol, publishing Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Pont de Londres, etc.).