Abbaye de Créteil

Abbaye de Créteil was a short-lived utopian community of French writers, artists, and composers founded in the autumn of 1906 in the town of Créteil, just outside Paris. Its name evokes the Abbey of Thélème in François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose sole rule was "do as you wish": the members hoped to build a self-sufficient community that would support itself through its own printing press and free artists from the pressures of the commercial market. The nucleus of the group comprised the poets and novelists Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, and René Arcos, joined by the painter Albert Gleizes, the composer Albert Doyen, and others. Aesthetically the circle is linked with "Unanimism," the idea of a shared, collective soul animating the crowd and the modern city. Despite its lofty ideals, financial hardship forced the community to disband as early as 1908, yet its experiment in communal living and cooperative publishing influenced later avant-garde associations across Europe.