Thesis (Pd.D.)—Boston University / Since World War II, the crisis in Algeria has intensified interest in French literature concerning North Africa. Attention has been refocused on Louis Bertrand (1866-1941), creator of the colon novel. Bertrand, born in Lorraine, graduated from the Ecole Normale. After teaching in Algiers (1891-1900), he abandoned pedagogy for writing and settled on the Riviera. He achieved membership in the Acad~mie FranQaise in 1926. Bertrand's extensive work includes twelve novels and over sixty nonfiction volumes. He contributed extensively to French journals. Critics early favored but later disparaged his contribution on personal as well as literar.y grounds. They have failed to interpret satisfactorily the unifying element in his work: latinite. By latinit-4 Bertrand referred ostensibly to the Latin peoples, to a core of their social and aesthetic ideals, and to the lands of lumiere in the western Mediterranean basin. He bade Latins rise to new preeminence by espousfug an authoritarian ideology based on class inequality of Roman Empire vintage. Bertrand determined that the latent unanimity of latinte might be animated by heightening the awareness of continuite from early Christian Rome to the present, with the Roman Catholic Church as proof extant of that link, and by appealing to the racial ego. [TRUNCATED]