Community of French writers, artists and composers in operation from November 1906 to February 1908, located in a villa on the banks of the Marne at Cr?teil, south-east of Paris. Their choice of name paid homage to Fran?ois Rabelais, whose Gargantua had established the Abbey of Thelema as a model monastery, a self-supporting commune whose members devoted part of each day to group labour and the rest to perfecting the self intellectually. The Abbaye de Cr?teil numbered among its members the painters Albert Gleizes, Charles Berthold-Mahn and Jacques d'Otemar, the poets Charles Vildrac (b 1882), Georges Duhamel (1884-1966), Ren? Arcos, Alexandre Mercereau, JULES ROMAINS, Henri-Martin Barzun (b 1881), the composer Albert Doyen, and the printer Lucien Linard, whom Gleizes had met while doing his military service. It was through Linard's trade of printing and publishing that the Abbaye hoped to secure its material future.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
