  Here we consider a gravitational action having local Poincare invariance
which is given by the dimensional continuation of the Euler density in ten
dimensions. It is shown that the local supersymmetric extension of this action
requires the algebra to be the maximal extension of the N=1 super-Poincare
algebra. The resulting action is shown to describe a gauge theory for the
M-algebra, and is not the eleven-dimensional supergravity theory of
Cremmer-Julia-Scherk. The theory admits a class of vacuum solutions of the form
S^{10-d} x Y_{d+1}, where Y_{d+1} is a warped product of R with a d-dimensional
spacetime. It is shown that a nontrivial propagator for the graviton exists
only for d=4 and positive cosmological constant. Perturbations of the metric
around this solution reproduce linearized General Relativity around
four-dimensional de Sitter spacetime.
