Raoul Vaneigem was born in Paris on 8 November 1926. He is the son of Jacques Vaneigem, a philosopher who co-founded Situationism together with Guy Debord, and Renée Chantal, an actress. Raoul's mother came from a military family, his father was the son of a sergeant of Belgian origin. He grew up in Brussels and spent several years in Toulon before returning to Brussels at the age of twelve
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During these years, he attended Belgian secondary school where he started writing poetry. He then began his studies at the University of Brussels, where he became interested in Camus' philosophy and existentialism. During World War II he was arrested by the German authorities, but was released after showing them proof of his Jewish origin.
He continued his studies at the University of Louvain, where he completed his thesis on Camus' philosophy under the supervision of Louis Althusser. After graduating in 1947, Vaneigem relocated to Paris where he worked as an editor for various journals on philosophy and art until 1950. In this period, he also published several articles on poetry and aesthetics—his first important work—and started writing poems again (he had given up poetry during World War II).
On this subject, Vaneigem wrote: "Without my first poem I would not have written my first novel." This first novel (published under the pseudonym Raoul Stael) is very different from what followed: it is written in free verse on the theme of death and was inspired by Camus' The Stranger which Vaneigem read for the first time during his stay in prison. In 1952 Vaneigem accepted a job as curator at the Société du Louvre Museum in charge of modern art exhibitions. In 1958 he released a second book under his own name: Le Joujou du diable (The Devil's Toy) which is based on a story by Dostoevsky's The Devils.
It is a collection of poems that has been described as "a turning point" in Vaneigem's career because it made him into a poet again after more than ten years as an author only. In addition to this work, he also published two other books during this period: Aspects de l'esthétique du désir (Aesthetic Aspects of Desire), around 1957, and L'Harmattan du diable (The Devil's Harmattan),