André Breton

gigatos | June 8, 2022

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Summary

André Breton, born on February 19, 1896 in Tinchebray in the Orne and died on September 28, 1966 in Paris 10e, is a French poet and writer, main animator and theoretician of surrealism.

Author of the books Nadja, L”Amour fou and the various Manifestes du surréalisme, his role as leader of the surrealist movement, and his critical and theoretical work for writing and the visual arts, make André Breton a major figure in 20th century French art and literature.

From the attempt of a poetic coup d”état to the First Manifesto (1924)

André Breton was born on February 19, 1896 in Tinchebray in Normandy, where he spent his first four years. The only son of Louis-Justin Breton, a gendarme born in the Vosges, he came from the Catholic petty bourgeoisie whose mother imposed a rigid education. He spent an uneventful childhood in Pantin (now Seine-Saint-Denis, then a department of the Seine), first at the corner of rue Montgolfier and rue Etienne-Marcel from 1902 to 1913, and then on avenue Edouard-Vaillant until 1918, the year in which the family moved to Paris.

At the Chaptal College, he followed a “modern” schooling (without Latin or Greek), and was noticed by his rhetoric teacher who introduced him to Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans, and by his philosophy teacher who opposed positivism (“order and progress”) to the Hegelian thoughts (“freedom of self-consciousness”) that the young man liked. He befriended Théodore Fraenkel and René Hilsum, who published his first poems in the college”s literary magazine. In spite of his parents who saw him as an engineer, Breton enters the PCN, a preparatory class for medical studies, with Fraenkel.

At the beginning of 1914, he sent a few poems in the style of Stéphane Mallarmé to the journal La Phalange, which was edited by the symbolist poet Jean Royère. The latter published them and put Breton in touch with Paul Valéry.

When war was declared, on August 3, he was with his parents in Lorient. His only book was a collection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, whom he did not know well. Judging his poetry so “tuned to the circumstances”, he reproached his friend Fraenkel for his lukewarmness in front of “such a considerable work”. For his part, he proclaims “the profound artistic inferiority of the realist work on the other.” Declared “good for service” on February 17, 1915, Breton was mobilized to the 17th artillery regiment and sent to Pontivy, in the artillery, to do his training in what he would later describe as “a cesspool of blood, stupidity and mud.” Reading articles by renowned intellectuals such as Maurice Barrès and Henri Bergson reinforced his disgust with the prevailing nationalism. At the beginning of July 1915, he was transferred to the health service as a nurse and assigned to the volunteer hospital in Nantes. At the end of the year, he wrote his first letter to Guillaume Apollinaire to which he attached the poem December. In December 1915, he met a convalescing soldier, Jacques Vaché, at the municipal ambulance 103bis in Nantes. It was intellectual “love at first sight”. To Breton”s literary temptations, Vaché opposes Alfred Jarry, the “desertion inside oneself” and obeys only one law, the “Umour (without h)”.

The young Breton discovers in a textbook by Doctors Emmanuel Régis and Angelo Hesnard what was then called the “psychoanalysis” of Sigmund Freud. In the summer of 1916, at his request, he was assigned to the Centre for Neuro-Psychiatry in Saint-Dizier, which was run by a former assistant of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot. In direct contact with patients suffering from psychopathologies, he refused to see in madness only a mental deficit, but rather a capacity for creation. “The distress, sometimes the physical decay of the mentally ill struck him forever,” explains Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, a specialist in Freud. On November 20, 1916, Breton was sent to the front as a stretcher bearer.

Back in Paris in 1917, he met Pierre Reverdy, with whom he collaborated on his review Nord-Sud, and Philippe Soupault, whom Apollinaire introduced to him: “You must become friends. Soupault introduced him to Lautréamont”s Les Chants de Maldoror, which caused him great emotion. With Louis Aragon, whom he met at the Val-de-Grâce hospital, they spent their nights on guard duty reciting passages from Maldoror to each other amidst the “screams and sobs of terror triggered by the air raid on the patients” (Aragon).

In a letter of July 1918 to Fraenkel, Breton evokes the project in common with Aragon and Soupault, of a book on some painters like Giorgio De Chirico, André Derain, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Henri Rousseau… in which would be “told in the English way” the life of the artist, by Soupault, the analysis of the works, by Aragon, and some reflections on art, by Breton himself. There would also be poems by each of them in front of some paintings.

Despite the war, censorship and the anti-German spirit, echoes of Dada demonstrations and some of their publications, such as the Dada Manifesto 3, reached Breton from Zurich, Berlin and Cologne. In January 1919, deeply affected by the death of Jacques Vaché, Breton believed he saw in Tristan Tzara the reincarnation of his friend”s spirit of revolt: “I no longer knew from whom to expect the courage that you show. It is towards you that all my eyes turn today.

Planned since the previous summer by Aragon, Breton and Soupault (the “three musketeers” as Paul Valéry called them), the journal Littérature was created and the first issue appeared in February 1919. Paul Éluard met the following month and was immediately integrated into the group.

After the publication of Mont de piété, which brings together his first poems written since 1913, Breton experiments with “automatic writing” with Soupault: texts written without any reflection, at different speeds, without retouching or repentance. Les Champs magnétiques, written in May and June 1919, was not published until a year later. Its critical success made it a precursor of surrealism, even if its “automatic” nature was called into question by the discovery of erasures and variants in the manuscripts.

In Littérature, the Poésies de Lautréamont, fragments of the Champs magnétiques and the inquiry Pourquoi écrivez-vous? were successively published, but Breton remained dissatisfied with the journal. After meeting Francis Picabia, whose intelligence, humor, charm and vivacity seduced him, Breton understood that he had nothing to expect from the “elders”, nor from Apollinaire”s legacy: the Esprit nouveau adorned with French common sense and its horror of chaos, nor from the “moderns” Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle perpetuating the tradition of the novel which he rejected (and will always reject).

On January 23, 1920, Tristan Tzara finally arrived in Paris. Breton”s disappointment to see a being “so uncharismatic” appear is as high as he expected. He saw himself with Tzara “kill art”, which seems to him the most urgent to do even if “the preparation of the coup d”état may take years.” With Picabia and Tzara, they organized the Dada demonstrations that most often aroused incomprehension, heckles and scandals, goals sought. But from August, Breton distances himself from Dada. He refused to write a preface to Picabia”s book Jesus Christ Rastaquouère: “I”m not even sure that Dadaism has won, at every moment I realize that I reform it in me.

At the end of the year, Breton was hired by the couturier, bibliophile, and modern art lover Jacques Doucet. Doucet, “a personality in love with the rare and the impossible, with just the right amount of imbalance,” commissioned Breton to write letters on literature and painting, as well as to advise him on the purchase of artworks. Among other things, Breton made him buy the painting Les Demoiselles d”Avignon by Picasso.

After the “Barrès trial” (May 1921), rejected by Picabia and during which Tzara had indulged in potty insolence, Breton considered the absolute pessimism of the Dadaists as infantilism. The following summer, he took advantage of a stay in the Tyrol to visit Sigmund Freud in Vienna, but the latter kept his distance from the leader of those he was tempted to consider as “integral madmen”.

In January 1922, Breton tried to organize an “International Congress for the determination of the directives and the defense of the modern spirit”. Tzara”s opposition prevented it from being held. A new series of Literature with Breton and Soupault as directors, recruits new collaborators such as Rene Crevel, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac but, definitely hostile to Picabia, Soupault distances himself from the surrealists. With Crevel, Breton experimented with hypnotic sleep to free the speech of the unconscious. These states of forced sleep will reveal the amazing faculties of “improvisation” of Benjamin Péret and Desnos. At the end of February 1923, doubting the sincerity of some and fearing for the mental health of others, Breton decided to stop the experiment.

Breton seemed tired of everything: he considered the journalistic activities of Aragon and Desnos, however remunerative, as a waste of time. Picabia”s writings disappointed him, and he was angry at the overly literary projects of his friends – “always novels! In an interview with Roger Vitrac, he even confided his intention to stop writing. However, during the following summer, he wrote most of the poems of Clair de terre.

On October 15, 1924, Le Manifeste du surréalisme (The Surrealist Manifesto) was published as a separate volume, initially intended to be the preface to the collection of automatic texts Poisson soluble. Putting the realist attitude on trial, Breton evoked the path taken up to that point and defined this new concept, claiming the rights of the imagination, pleading for the marvelous, inspiration, childhood and objective chance.

“OVERREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside of any aesthetic or moral concern – Encycl. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected until now, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin definitively all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the resolution of the main problems of life.”

A few days later, the group publishes the pamphlet Un cadavre, written in reaction to the national funeral of Anatole France: “Loti, Barrès, France, let us mark with a beautiful white sign the year that laid to rest these three sinister men: the idiot, the traitor and the policeman. With France, it is a little of human servility which goes away. May we celebrate the day when we bury cunning, traditionalism, patriotism and heartlessness!”

Also read, biographies – Thomas Newcomen

“Transforming the world” and “changing life” (1925-1938)

On December 1, 1924, the first issue of the Surrealist Revolution, the organ of the group led by Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville, appeared. Breton radicalized his action and his political position. His reading of Leon Trotsky”s work on Lenin and the colonial war waged by France in the Moroccan Rif brought him closer to the communist intellectuals. With the collaborators of the magazines Clarté and Philosophie, the surrealists form a committee and write a common tract: “The Revolution first and always”.

In January 1927, Aragon, Breton, Éluard, Péret and Pierre Unik joined the French Communist Party. They justify their membership in the leaflet “Au grand jour” (In the open). Breton was assigned to a cell of gas workers.

On October 4, 1926, he met Léona Delcourt, alias Nadja, in the street. They met every day until October 13. She ordered Breton to write “a novel about me. Beware: everything weakens, everything disappears. Something must remain of us…”. Retired to the manor house of Ango, near Varengeville-sur-Mer, in August 1927, in the company of Aragon, Breton began writing Nadja. In November, during a reading he gave to the group, Breton met Suzanne Muzard. It is love at first sight. Although she is Emmanuel Berl”s mistress, she shares a passionate and stormy affair with Breton. She asked Breton to divorce Simone, which he agreed to, but curbed in her desire for adventure by her taste for comfort and material security, she married Emmanuel Berl, without breaking permanently with Breton. The relationship, made up of break-ups and reunions, lasted until January 1931. For her, Breton added a third part to Nadja.

This unhappy love weighs on Breton”s mood: disagreements in the group, detachment of Robert Desnos, public altercation with Soupault, closure of the Surrealist Gallery for negligent management … The publication of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (December 1929) was an opportunity for Breton to relaunch the movement and, in the words of Mark Polizzotti, “all the changes that the movement had known during its first five years and in particular the passage (…) from psychic automatism to political militancy. Breton is then immersed in the reading of Marx, Engels and Hegel; and the question of the real in its political dimension as well as that of the commitment of the individual occupy his reflection as the incipit of the book specifies it. This second manifesto is also the occasion for him to settle his accounts, in a violent way, using insults and sarcasm, and to take stock of the upheavals that the group has experienced in recent years. Breton justifies his intransigence by his will to discover, being inspired by the Phenomenology of the spirit, this “point of the spirit from where the life and the death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the top and the bottom cease to be perceived contradictorily. The “excluded” targeted by the text reacted by publishing a pamphlet on the model of the one written against Anatole France a few years earlier and used the same title, “Un cadavre”. From then on, the opponents ironically crowned Breton “Pope of Surrealism”. Breton”s dark mood is fully expressed in what Mark Polizzotti calls the “most sinister passage of the manifesto” and which is according to him the reflection of a great “personal bitterness”, a sentence often quoted and reproached to Breton, in particular by Albert Camus: “The simplest surrealist act consists, revolvers in fists, to go down to the street and to shoot at random, as much as one can, in the crowd. Marguerite Bonnet notes that a very similar sentence had already appeared in an article published in 1925 in the second issue of La Révolution surréaliste and that it had not, at the time, attracted much attention. She argues that Breton alludes to the figure of Emile Henry who, shortly after his arrest, claimed to be called “Breton” and suggests that “a sort of slow transference, almost dreamlike in nature, moving into the most mysterious zones of sensitivity, would have prepared the fleeting temptation to identify with the exterminating angel of anarchy.

In reaction to the Second Manifesto, writers and artists published a collective collection of pamphlets against Breton, entitled Un Cadavre. Georges Limbour and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes commented on the sentence in which shooting at random in a crowd was described as the simplest surrealist act. Limbour saw it as an example of buffoonery and shamelessness and Ribemont-Dessaignes called Breton a hypocrite, a cop and a priest. After the publication of this pamphlet, the Manifesto will have a second edition, where Breton will add a note insisting on the fact, already indicated in the first edition, but less clearly, that to qualify an act as the simplest surrealist act is not to recommend committing it.

With several writer friends (René Char, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, etc.), he attacked head-on the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, which they described as a “carnival of skeletons”, intended to “give the citizens of the metropolis the awareness of ownership that they would need to hear the echo of the shootings without flinching. They also demanded “the immediate evacuation of the colonies”, and the holding of a trial on the crimes committed.

The Surrealist Revolution gives way to Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution (SASDLR). The title of the journal is by Aragon. Breton and André Thirion launched the idea of an Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (AEAR). This association was indeed created in January 1932 by the leading authorities of the French Communist Party, but neither Breton nor Thirion were solicited and their membership as well as that of other Surrealists was only taken into account at the end of 1932. From that time on, the surrealists found themselves within the AEAR on the positions of the Opposition of the Left.

Even if he does not despair of being able to direct the cultural action of the Party and to recover the dispersed psychic forces, reconciling Freudism with Marxism to the service of the proletariat, Breton does not cease to run up against the incomprehension and the growing distrust coming from the direction of the Communist Party.

When he denounces the censorship of the poetic activity by the political authority which strikes the poem of Aragon Front rouge, without hiding the little esteem that he has for this text of pure propaganda, Breton defends its author (Misère de la poésie), Aragon disavows this defense and provokes the definitive rupture and Paul Vaillant-Couturier reproaches him for a text of Ferdinand Alquié, published in SASDLR, denouncing the “wind of systematic cretinization which blows of the USSR”.

In response to the violent fascist demonstrations of February 6, 1934, in front of the National Assembly, Breton launched a Call to Struggle for all left-wing organizations. When asked, Léon Blum politely refused his support.

In 1934, Breton met Jacqueline Lamba in circumstances similar to those evoked in the poem Tournesol written in 1923. Of this meeting and the first moments of their love, Breton wrote the story L”Amour fou. From their union a daughter, Aube, was born.

In June 1935, Breton wrote the speech he was to give at the Writers” Congress for the Defense of Culture. But following a violent altercation with Ilya Ehrenbourg, the latter, delegate of the Soviet representation, having slandered the surrealists, Breton”s participation was cancelled. It was necessary the suicide of Rene Crevel so that the organizers concede to Éluard to read the text. The definitive break with the Party is consummated with the tract “From the time when the surrealists were right”.

In 1938, Breton organized the first International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris. On this occasion, he gave a lecture on black humor. That same year, he traveled to Mexico and met the painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as Leon Trotsky, with whom he wrote the manifesto For an Independent Revolutionary Art (ru), which led to the formation of an International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI). This initiative is at the origin of the rupture with Éluard.

Also read, biographies – Leo Africanus

From exile to insubordination (1939-1966)

Breton was mobilized in September 1939 and in January 1940 he was assigned to the pre-military air school in Poitiers as a doctor. On the day of the armistice (June 17), he was in the “non-occupied zone” and found refuge at the home of Pierre Mabille, the doctor who had given birth to Jacqueline, in Salon-de-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône). He was then joined by Jacqueline and their daughter Aube at the villa Air-Bel in Marseille, the headquarters of the American Committee for the Relief of Intellectuals created by Varian Fry. While waiting for a visa, the surrealists reconstituted a group and cheated the boredom and the wait by drawing exquisite corpses and creating the Jeu de Marseille. During a visit to Marseille by Marshal Pétain, André Breton, denounced as a “dangerous anarchist”, was preventively imprisoned on a ship for four days, while Vichy censors prohibited the publication of the Anthology of Black Humor and Fata Morgana.

Breton embarked for New York on March 25, 1941 with Wifredo Lam and Claude Lévi-Strauss. At the stopover in Fort-de-France (Martinique), Breton was interned and then released on bail. He met Aimé Césaire. On July 14, he arrived in New York, where many French intellectuals in exile remained during the war, and with Marcel Duchamp, Breton founded the magazine VVV and Pierre Lazareff hired him as a “speaker” for the radio broadcasts of the Voice of America to France. Jacqueline left him for the painter David Hare.

On December 10, 1943, Breton met Elisa Bindorff and together they traveled to the Gaspé Peninsula in the southeastern corner of Quebec. Upon his return to New York, he publishes Arcane 17 born of “the desire to write a book around the Arcane 17 taking as a model a lady I love…”.

To settle practical matters of divorce and remarriage, Breton and Elisa went to Reno, Nevada. He took the opportunity to visit the Hopi and Zuñi Indian reservations, taking with him works by Charles Fourier.

In December 1945, at the invitation of Pierre Mabille, appointed cultural attaché in Pointe-à-Pitre, Breton went to Haiti to give a series of lectures. His presence coincided with a popular uprising that overthrew the government in place. Accompanied by Wilfredo Lam, he met with the artists of the Centre d”Art de Port-au-Prince and bought several paintings from Hector Hyppolite, helping to launch an interest in Haitian popular painting. On May 25, 1946, he returned to France.

In June, he is invited to the evening of tributes to Antonin Artaud. It is with a lively and firm voice that Breton finally pronounces the “two watchwords that are one and the same: “transform the world” and “change life”.

Despite the difficulties of the reconstruction of France and the beginning of the Cold War, Breton intended to continue the activities of Surrealism without any inflection. And the polemics resume and follow one another: against Tristan Tzara presenting himself as the new leader of surrealism, against Jean-Paul Sartre who considered the surrealists as petty-bourgeois, against academics, dismantling the deception of a so-called unpublished Arthur Rimbaud, against Albert Camus and the chapters that it devotes to Lautréamont and surrealism in L”Homme révolté.

He found Georges Bataille for a new International Exhibition of Surrealism dedicated to Eros, frequently gives his assistance to many unknown artists by prefacing exhibition catalogs, and participates in several surrealist magazines such as Neon, Medium, Surrealism itself, Bief, La Brêche …

From 1947 on, André Breton took a close interest in Art Brut. With Jean Dubuffet, he participated in the creation of the Compagnie de l”Art Brut, officially created in July 1948, whose purpose was to “collect, preserve and exhibit the works of the mentally ill.”

Since 1948, André Breton has been actively committed to world citizenship.

In 1950, he co-signed with Suzanne Labin a circular letter dated March 8, 1950, proposing to “create a home for free culture in the face of invading obscurantism, particularly Stalinist obscurantism,” and proposing the formation of a patronage committee:

“French intellectuals who do not intend to abdicate and who had no platform until now, while countless Stalinist publications dishonor culture every day, propose to take up the challenge in the sector of civilization for which they are responsible. To this end, they want to found a literary and ideological journal where the great traditions of free examination would be taken up and revived.”

– (Project for a cultural magazine, typed document, Alfred Rosmer collection, The Social Museum, CEDIAS)

Among the personalities approached for the Patronage Committee were Albert Camus, René Char, Henri Frenay, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Sidney Hook, Aldous Huxley, Ignazio Silone and Richard Wright. According to Suzanne Labin: “All the members of the Patronage Committee responded positively to our proposals. None of them disagreed. In the end, the project did not succeed because of financial difficulties, not at all because of ideological differences.”

On October 12, 1951, he co-signed in Le Libertaire a “Declaration prior” to the manifesto “Surrealism and Anarchism”: “The struggle for the replacement of social structures and the activity deployed by surrealism to transform mental structures, far from being mutually exclusive, are complementary. Their junction must hasten the coming of an age freed from all hierarchy and all constraint.”

In 1954, a project of common action with the Lettrist International against the celebration of the centenary of Rimbaud failed when the Surrealists refused the “Marxist phraseology” proposed by the Lettrists in the common tract. Breton is then taken to task by Gil Joseph Wolman and Guy Debord who underline in a text on the allegorical mode his loss of speed within the movement. From 1953 to 1957 he directs, for the French Book Club, the publication of the 5 volumes of Forms of the Art, of which he writes himself the first volume: The magic Art. He shows his interest for the naive art by his meeting with the painter Ferdinand Desnos who paints his portrait in 1954.

In 1958, he signed with other surrealists the leaflet of the Committee of Anti-Nuclear Struggle (CLAN), Demasquez les physiciens, videz les laboratoires, which stigmatizes the scientists in the service of nuclear weapons.

In 1960, he signed the “Manifesto of 121”, a declaration on the right to insubordination during the Algerian war. At the same time, he became involved in the defense of the right to conscientious objection, among other things by sponsoring the committee created by Louis Lecoin, alongside Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono and Abbé Pierre. This committee obtained a restricted status for objectors in December 1963.

In 1965, he organized the 9th International Surrealist Exhibition entitled L”Écart absolu in reference to the Fourierist utopia.

On September 27, 1966, suffering from respiratory failure, André Breton was repatriated from Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, the village in the Lot where he had bought a house in 1951. He died the next day at the Lariboisière Hospital in Paris.

On his grave, decorated simply with a starry octahedron, in the Batignolles cemetery (31st division), in Paris (17th), is engraved the epitaph: “I seek the gold of time.”

“There is at the base of all deep reflection a feeling so perfect of our destitution that optimism could not preside over it… I believe myself to be sensitive as much as I can to a ray of sunlight, but this does not prevent me from realizing that my power is insignificant… I do justice to art in my heart but I distrust the most noble causes.

Determined face, chin forward, the corner of the lower lip sagging because of the pipe, leonine hair pulled back, the gaze staring at the invisible, André Breton embodied surrealism for fifty years, in spite of himself and in spite of the rejection of the institutions and honors constantly expressed.

All his life, Breton tried to take three paths on the same front: poetry, love, freedom.

Very early on, he distrusted novels and their authors gave him the impression that they were having fun at his expense. In a general way, he rejected the “French spirit” made of blasement, of deep atony which hides under the mask of lightness, of smugness, of the most hackneyed common sense taking itself for common sense, of unenlightened skepticism, of cunning. “With Breton, the marvelous replaces the nihilistic exhibitions and the irrational one opens the narrow doors of the real without true return to the symbolism” (Hubert Haddad).

To abolish the conformisms and the prejudices, to fight the rationalism, Breton will use poetry like a weapon with the multiple facets which are the imagination, “which makes with it only the real things”, the wonder, the accounts of dreams and the surprises of the chance, the automatic writing, the short cuts of the metaphor and the image. “What do poetry and art do? They advertise. The object of the advertisement is also to boast. The power of advertising is much greater than that of poetry. Poetry has always been seen as an end. I make it a means. This is the death of art (of art for art”s sake). The other arts follow poetry.”

It is a question of “finding the secret of a language whose elements cease to behave as wrecks on the surface of a dead sea.”

In order to succeed in his enterprise of poetic subversion, Breton avoided any daily food work, going so far as to forbid his closest friends (Aragon, Desnos) to commit themselves to journalism. “The revelation of the meaning of one”s own life is not obtained at the price of work. Nothing is useful to be alive, if it is necessary that one works.

For Breton, love, like dreams, is a marvel where man finds contact with the deep forces. In love with love and women, he denounces society for having too often made the relationship between man and woman a curse from which the mystical idea of unique love would be born. Love “opens the doors of the world where, by definition, there can be no more question of evil, fall or sin”. “There is no solution except love.

“I have never known a man with a greater capacity for love. A greater power to love the greatness of life, and one understands nothing of his hatreds if one does not know that it was for him to protect the very quality of his love of life, of the wonder of life. Breton loved like a heart beats. He was the lover of love in a world that believed in prostitution. It is there his sign” (Marcel Duchamp).

Particularly attached to the metaphor of the “glass house”, Breton gave himself over to an analysis of some of his dreams in the “Vases Communicants” as if there were no border between the conscious and the unconscious. For him, the dream is the emanation of its deep impulses which indicates a solution that the recourse to the conscious activity cannot bring to him.

Breton”s opponents have called him, sometimes derisively, often vehemently, the “Pope of Surrealism. However, if the author of the Manifestos has constantly influenced the movement”s guiding line, he has always been careful not to appear as a “leader”, even if he has been intransigent, even intolerant, when he considered that the integrity of the Surrealist movement was in danger. Any idea of constraint, military, clerical or social, always aroused in him a deep revolt.

Presenting what have always been his objectives, Breton writes: “The real life is absent”, Rimbaud already said. This will be the moment not to be missed to reconquer it. In all fields, I think that it will be necessary to bring to this research all the audacity of which the man is capable. And Breton adds some words of order:

“Persistent faith in automatism as a probe, persistent hope in the “dialectic” (that of Heraclitus, of Master Eckhart, of Hegel) for the resolution of the antinomies that overwhelm man, recognition of the “objective chance” as an index of possible reconciliation of the ends of nature and the ends of man in the eyes of the latter, will of permanent incorporation to the psychic apparatus of the “black humor” which, to a certain temperature can alone play the role of valve, preparation of practical order to an intervention on the mythical life, which takes at first, on the biggest scale, figure of cleaning. “

– The Key to the Fields

What Breton rehabilitates under the name of “objective chance” is the old belief in the encounter between human desire and the mysterious forces that act to achieve it. But this notion is devoid of any mystical foundation in his eyes. He bases himself on his personal experiences of “synchronicities” and on the metapsychic experiments he observed at the International Metapsychic Institute.

To emphasize his agreement with dialectical materialism, he quotes Friedrich Engels: “Causality can only be understood in connection with the category of objective chance, the form of manifestation of necessity.” In his works, the poet analyzes at length the phenomena of objective chance of which he was the upset recipient. Nadja seems to possess a mediumistic power that allows her to predict certain events. Thus she announces that a certain window will light up with a red light, which happens almost immediately in the eyes of an amazed Breton. Michel Zéraffa tried to summarize Breton”s theory as follows: “The cosmos is a cryptogram that contains a decryptor: man. Thus one measures the evolution of the Poetic Art from symbolism to surrealism, from Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire to Breton.

The “black humor”, expression whose modern sense was built by Breton, is one of the essential springs of the surrealism. The negation of the principle of reality that it comprises is the very foundation. According to Étienne-Alain Hubert “the humor, far from being a brilliant exercise, engages deep zones of the being and in the most authentic and the most new forms that it knows then, it takes shape on a background of despair.” . He published in 1940 an Anthology of the black humor. For Michel Carrouges it is necessary to speak, about the work of Breton as of that of Benjamin Péret, of a “synthesis of the imitation of the nature under its accidental forms, on the one hand, and of the humor, on the other hand, as paradoxical triumph of the principle of pleasure on the real conditions”.

The assumed homophobia of André Breton was put forward to explain in particular the rejection of the surrealist movement towards personalities like Jean Cocteau and René Crevel.

The complete works of André Breton were published by Gallimard in four volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade under the direction of Marguerite Bonnet, for the first two volumes, and Étienne-Alain Hubert, for the following two volumes (1988). (OCLC 20526303)

Review: La Bréche, Action surréaliste, directed by André Breton, Éric Losfeld, from 1961 to 1967 (no 1 to 8).

Correspondence

The entirety of André Breton”s correspondence, in accordance with his testamentary dispositions, has been accessible online since September 2016.

Also read, biographies – Sully Prudhomme

External links

Sources