The novel “Nechaev Returned,” published in 1987 after the high-profile terrorist attack by the organization “Direct Action,” became an event in France—something that critic Andre Brencourt expressed in the newspaper “Figaro”: “We experience this ‘action’ together with the heroes of the darkest of series, imagining that by the author’s will we have been transported into some fantastic world—until it suddenly becomes clear that it is the world in which we live.”