Charles Plisnier

He was a Communist in his youth and briefly belonged to the Trotskyist movement in the late 1920s. He disavowed communism, and became a Roman Catholic, remaining nevertheless a Marxist. He turned to literature, writing family sagas against bourgeois society. Mariages (1936; "Nothing to Chance") deals with the limitations of social conventions; the five-volume Meurtres (1939–41; "Murders") centres on an idealistic tragic hero, Noël Annequin, in his fight against hypocrisy.[1]

In 1937, he won the Prix Goncourt for Faux passeports, short stories denouncing Stalinism, in the same spirit as Arthur Koestler. He was the first foreigner to receive Prix Goncourt. He was also a Walloon movement activist and at the end of the Walloon National Congress there was a standing ovation after his speech, the assembly then singing La Marseillaise.