n 1943, Robert Filliou joined the Resistance movement organized by the communists and became a member of the French Communist Party during the war (he would later leave it after Tito's exclusion for the Communist International). In 1947, he went to the United States to meet his father who he had never known. After working as a labourer for Coca Cola in Los Angeles, he began to study (while continuing to do "odd jobs" to earn his living) and achieved a masters in economics 1. In 1951, he took dual French-American nationality. As a United Nations advisor, he was sent to Korea for three years to help write the Constitution and take part in the programmes for economic reconstruction of the country. From there, he travelled in the Far East 2. From 1954 to 1959, he lived in Egypt, Spain and Denmark, where he met Marianne Staffels, the woman with whom he would share his life and his artistic activity. In 1959, he returned to France (he visited regularly after that). However, he was not attached to any country (as he himself said: nationality = poet, profession = French). In Paris, in the Contrescarpe area, Daniel Spoerri introduced him to the world of the plastic artists. This was in the middle of the boom of the 1960s, with the return in strength of Duchamp's ideas, the appearance of Fluxus and the effervescent avant-garde of the Nouveaux Réalistes.