At the boundary of action and dream: Surrealism and the battle for post-Liberation France

Les Temps modernes and Surrealism

Through the efforts of Sartre’s circle, the left-bank neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés became a hotbed for Existentialist thought, the nerve centre of the post-war intellectual milieu, and a site of fascination for thinkers and tourists alike. Sartre’s journal, Les Temps modernes, whose editorial board in September 1944 included Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Albert Ollivier and Jean Paulhan, promoted commitment and responsibility as it commented on the cultural scene. ⁶ Les Temps modernes continued in the tradition of inter-war literary and opinion-shaping journals such as Europe and Paulhan’s Nouvelle Revue française (NRF). ⁷ Sartre’s journal, however, marked a radical departure from earlier literary journals: while the title evoked the 1936 Charlie Chaplin film of the same name, it also pointed in a new direction in France, which Sartre believed he was in the unique position to guide and promote. As Anna Boschetti explains, Les Temps modernes offered a new model of review – ‘a model which seems to combine literary and philosophical excellence, freedom and commitment, close reasoning and the capacity to think about everything’ – in a way that other journals simply could not match (Boschetti, 1988: 144–5). Its legitimacy was further underscored by the prestige of the editorial board and by the selection of Gallimard as publisher (1988: 137–8). ⁸ As such, the journal strategically challenged the inter-war generation of writers and reviews by demarcating its place on the French intellectual landscape, and signified a shift in the literary field.

Since he maintained that the fundamental nature of cultural activity was dissent and criticism, Sartre adroitly differentiated his principles from those of the PCF and the Surrealists, citing both by name. Having become a committed leftist due to his experience during the Occupation – and perhaps under pressure from Beauvoir and others – Sartre nevertheless rejected the party apparatus (although he, like the Surrealists in the 1920s, had attempted a rapprochement with French Marxists during the Occupation) and considered himself and others in his circle the antitheses of the official Communist intellectual, given the Existentialist emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility. The Communists returned Sartre’s antipathy. ⁹ Roger Garaudy, the spokesperson for the PCF on aesthetic affairs, recognised the challenge posed by Sartre and Les Temps modernes. Accordingly, Garaudy berated Existentialism’s revolutionary ambition, judging it ‘cette pensée, coupée du réel [que] n’a aucune prise sur la classe ouvrière’ (Garaudy, 1945: 1). Moreover, the writers of Les Temps modernes distinguished themselves from the Surrealists and addressed the group on several occasions (including an article by the American critic Clement Greenberg, who downplayed the significance of their art on the development of American abstract expressionism) and most prominently in Sartre’s own influential essay ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’ published in Les Temps modernes in 1947. ¹⁰

The fourth instalment of ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’, subtitled ‘Situation de l’écrivain en 1947’, outlined the responsibility of the writer. In order to overcome alienation within modern society, it emphasised the importance of time, place and audience, and decreed that writers be firmly situated in their times. ¹¹ Since the majority of Surrealists were in exile during the war – absent, that is, during the Occupation and the Liberation ¹² – Sartre’s definition of an engaged writer virtually proscribed their having any voice in the post-war world. Further, the Surrealist goal of eradicating the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious, and between dreams and waking life constituted a state of being which Sartre declared ‘impossible’. Its poetry was far too ambiguous, the centrality of psychoanalysis and automatic writing in its practices released the Surrealist from his situation in the world, and the Surrealist refusal of consciousness weakened any call to action. Conversely, engaged literature – confined by Sartre to prose, not poetry – answered that call to action and represented ‘la littérature des grandes circonstances’ (1947: 1630). ¹³ Literary and artistic problems must be, in Sartre’s opinion, answered by engagement with the subject and the broader cultural sphere, not through escapist Surrealist practices.

In addition to his established role as literary arbiter, Sartre also discounted Surrealist revolutionary aspirations. In his opinion the destructive nature embraced by the Surrealists alienated them from the masses and attracted only the thrill-seeking bourgeoisie, which Sartre viewed as the group’s sole audience. The Surrealist ‘provocation au meurtre’ allowed the writer to evade responsibility, destroy at will, and provoke scandal but escape the consequences (Sartre, 1947: 1208). World events combined to make his generation of writers particularly situated to affect change, in Sartre’s opinion. In contrast, the Surrealists’:

déclarations révolutionnaires demeurent purement théoriques, puisqu’elles ne changent rien à leur attitude, ne leur font pas gagner un seul lecteur et ne trouvent aucun écho chez les ouvriers; ils demeurent les parasites de la classe qu’ils insultent, leur révolte demeure en marge de la révolution. (Sartre, 1947: 1426)

For Sartre, Surrealism languished at the edges of the left while offering no viable ideas for the situation facing post-war France.

In 1947, Sartre’s words – direct, confrontational and claiming full engagement with the here-and-now – resonated with many for whom the experience of the war created immediate, material concerns. Despite his interest, during the 1930s, in themes of crime and madness, Sartre’s later charge that the Surrealists embraced an arbitrary form of violence attracted particular attention and was impossible for Breton to avoid. ¹⁴ When asked in 1948 about Sartre’s indictment of the destructive nature of the movement, Breton reaffirmed that humankind’s existence involved more than just everyday concerns. Rather, the liberation of the mind remained equally important. ‘Indisputably we have to change current living conditions’, Breton explained; however, ‘it’s puerile to believe that a rectification of living conditions, even a radical one, would put an end to conflict: conflict would resurface in other spheres, because of the power of man’s desire and its fundamental dissatisfaction’ (Breton, 1993a [1948]: 224). A veteran of an earlier war and a survivor of that après-guerre, Breton emphasised the basic tenets of Surrealism for answers to the material and psychic concerns of post-Liberation life.

‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’ elicited rebuttals from writers who espoused the revolutionary possibilities of Surrealist poetry. Author and critic Léon-Gabriel Gros focused on the criticism of poetry, and although he never mentioned Sartre by name, addressed him indirectly with an insult: ‘Le souci qu’a Breton de ‘repassionner [sic] la vie’ paraîtra sans doute dérisoire aux métaphysiciens du désespoir comme leur paraît dérisoire l’activité poétique elle-même’ (Gros, 1947: 842). By contrast, Breton’s poetic work constituted for Gros an ‘œuvre de combat’ determined by historical conditions. ¹⁵ Claude Mauriac, the critic, journalist and novelist who would become a leading advocate of the nouveau roman in the 1950s and 60s (and son of François), also weighed in on the debate. His unambiguous rejoinder ‘Sartre contre Breton’ offered arguments to ‘condemn the condemnation’ of Surrealism by Existentialism. Only Surrealism, Mauriac explained, understood the mental and moral ‘univers’ and our position in it:

Mais, ainsi que ses amis et [Breton] le déclaraient récemment dans un manifeste, si les problèmes poses par le surréalisme n’ont pas été résolus, il en a néanmoins circonscrit les données avec une précision et une rigueur toujours plus grandes. La part de Breton dans cette prospection préliminaire est de toute première importance, et telle que les plus intelligentes analyses de Sartre en apparaissent stériles. (Mauriac, 1947: 7)

Mauriac’s defence of Surrealism parallels Georges Bataille’s admission of its moral dimension and its preference for process rather than reliance on result. Bataille assaulted Sartre’s charge of poetry as irrelevant and restrictive, and opened up a broader offensive on the editor of Les Temps modernes. Surrealism’s self-proclaimed ‘old enemy from within’, Bataille became one of its staunchest supporters in the years following the Liberation by contributing an important body of theoretical writing on the group. A review of Arcane 17, a poetic text that Breton had written during the last days of the war, allowed Bataille to elaborate on the differences between Surrealism and Existentialism even before Sartre drew his own distinctions in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? ¹⁶ ‘Quand le surréalisme, lui, met tout en jeu’, Bataille writes, ‘étant dès l’abord sommation morale’ (Bataille, 1946: 70). A release from rational control (allowed by automatic writing and dreams) pointed Surrealist writing in the direction of poetry and away from fixity of meaning: a positive step, in Bataille’s view. The Surrealist prerogative, according to Bataille in this and other post-war essays, was to free the activity of the mind from the kind of servitude that focused not on process or the present moment (‘l’instant’) but rather on a concern for the outcome. In the Surrealist ‘valeur de l’instant’ then, ‘l’accent n’est pas mis sur le fait de choisir mais sur le contenu du choix proposé’ (Bataille, 1946: 80). With results not preordained, Surrealist writing freely opens up possibilities and retains sovereignty.

Arguing in favour of poetic liberty, Bataille positioned himself and Surrealism a priori against Sartre’s description of an engaged writer ‘[qui] sait que la parole est action’ (Sartre, 1947: 780). ¹⁷ Rather, Bataille noted that the profound difference between Surrealism and Sartre’s Existentialism hangs not on the question of liberty but rather on ‘ce caractère d’existence de la liberté’: ‘Si je ne l’asservis pas, la liberté existera: c’est la poésie; les mots, n’ayant plus à servir à quelque désignation utile, se déchaînement est l’image de l’existence libre, qui n’est jamais donnée que dans l’instant’ (Bataille, 1946: 80). ¹⁸ For Bataille, littérature engagée amounted to little more than writing restrained by its insistence on the heavy weight of its own words. Through its constant questioning and a strong scepticism of fixed ideas about morality, Bataille believed that Surrealism provided the antidote needed in épuration-era France, when the process of punishment for collaboration with the German occupiers had become a murky and uneven enterprise. ¹⁹

From Brooklyn to the quays of the Seine

The ‘univers moral’ identified above by Claude Mauriac proved to be prime real estate in the post-war culture debates, a space claimed loudly by French Communists. With right-wing political parties severely discredited after the Occupation, leftist parties stood to gain ground in both votes and ideological influence. Self-proclaimed as the ‘parti des fusillés’, the PCF played an integral role in the Resistance and the liberation of France. Support for the party proved strongest in the immediate aftermath of the Occupation, when its exploits in the Resistance weighed heavily on the collective memory. ²⁰ French Communists parlayed this status into political power after the war, winning a majority of seats in the first post-war elections held in October 1945.

Although the Moscow trials of the mid 1930s had driven away many writers, artists and thinkers (including the Surrealists) from the PCF, the adherence and visibility of intellectuals consistently boosted its standing and became a post-war priority for Communist leaders. At the Tenth National Congress of the French Communist Party, Roger Garaudy laid out the potential for the party in this regard. Because of its role in the war and in the economic reconstruction of France, the party was capable of spearheading the post-war intellectual and moral renaissance. The PCF had already achieved a degree of success, proclaimed Garaudy, since the party had expanded into the intellectual milieux (Garaudy and Cogniot, 1945: 2). Although there were difficulties to contend with, Garaudy explained, the PCF remained confident in its ability to attract the most prominent thinkers of the day.

Every French intellectual had to address the question of whether to join the party. Responses varied significantly. Some rejected it outright, such as Breton, Bataille, Benjamin Péret and other post-war Surrealists, as well as writers Raymond Aron and François Mauriac. A number accepted it wholeheartedly, including former Surrealists Aragon, Paul Éluard and Tristan Tzara, along with one of its most celebrated adherents, Pablo Picasso. Others joined the ranks as fellow travellers and non-aligned Communists.

Anti-Communist observers bristled at what they viewed as blind adherence to the party among certain members of the French intelligentsia. For example, Victor Serge and Raymond Aron, both of whom strove to expose the totalitarian character of the Soviet state, addressed the beliefs propagated by the party that drew writers, artists and thinkers into its fold. Serge noted attractions that included the ‘old revolutionary myth’ (that is, the promise of an as-yet-to-arrive proletarian revolution), the party’s supreme organisational skills, the loyalty of workers and older intellectuals, and the Red Army victories during World War II (1945: 234). For Aron, ‘seductive myths’ held out the possibilities of universal plenty based on technological progress, the reconstruction of the social order after the catastrophe of World War II, and the ‘myth of humanity’s salvation through the rebellion and triumph of the unfortunate, that is, the proletariat’ (Aron, 1950: 598). ²¹ Communists also suggested that non-adherence to the party amounted to support of Fascism, a criticism levelled at personalities of the non-aligned left, Breton and the Surrealists included.

To sustain its Occupation-era prestige and push its post-war agenda, party apparatchiks, under the tutelage of Moscow, pursued a large-scale cultural propaganda campaign. French Communists cast themselves as the opposition: they focused first on purging those who had collaborated with the Germans during the war, but in the later 1940s they attempted to enact a complete Communist renaissance by identifying potential cultural risks and providing ideologically sound alternatives. In a series of articles titled ‘Périls sur la culture’, Les Lettres françaises set out to protect France against an enemy bent on decimating progressive culture and ‘les valeurs de libération humaine’. This enemy was understood to be Western influence, particularly that of the United States. Articles encouraged fervent followers and fellow travellers to defend and promote ‘les valeurs nouvelles porteuses de libération, d’espoir et de Bonheur. De porter plus haut la conscience humaine. Dissiper le brouillard, les mystifications, les mensonges, les falsifications’ (Les Lettres françaises, 1948: 2). The moral urgency of the Communist message rang clearly as the inaugural article closed on a decidedly bellicose note:

De quelque côté que l’on se tourne, les mêmes questions cruciales se trouvent posées qui engagent tout l’avenir de la culture et son progrès. C’est partout la même bataille et le même front. Et il n’est pas trop, non seulement de l’union, mais surtout de la contribution de tous les hommes honnêtes pour sauvegarder ce qui fait notre raison de vivre et pour porter plus loin, plus haut les raisons d’espérer, qui nous viennent de l’incessant combat des peuples pour leur Libération. (1948: 2).

The war against Fascism was over; ideological skirmishes with the capitalist West had just begun.

Part of this offensive, one in which the Surrealists became directly involved, reignited a debate between the merits of abstraction and realism, specifically Socialist Realism promoted by the Soviet Union and embraced by French Communists such as Louis Aragon. Zhdanovism, named for the man who formulated the USSR’s aggressive propaganda programme, advocated strict government authority over the arts, literature and all intellectual activity, and promoted a conservative, anti-experimental approach to each, a policy that proliferated among Communists in France. ²² The control of the intelligentsia proved crucial to Zhdanovism and to Soviet policy in general. Andrei Zhdanov’s call to arms to Communist intellectuals inspired Aragon to resume his fight on behalf of Socialist Realism.

The post-war Querelle du réalisme in France, with its fight over the reintroduction of Socialist Realism as official Communist aesthetic doctrine, had its roots in the inter-war disputes that had divided leftist artists and intellectuals in the 1930s (1956). The Soviet-backed Maison de la Culture in Paris had served as the arena for the debates, where the polemic had gone public between 1935 and 1936. Active participants in that campaign had included Aragon, whose lecture transcripts, published as Pour un réalisme socialiste, served as a primary text supporting the Soviet-derived aesthetic and came on the heels of his dramatic departure from Surrealism; Le Corbusier, who came down firmly on the side of abstraction; and Fernand Léger, who called for a ‘New Realism’.

The realism debate, which saw the collision of world politics and personal loyalties, was reactivated in 1946 and 1947 with a fervour that galvanised the PCF. Unassailable boundaries existed between those who advocated Socialist Realism and those who opposed it. Roger Garaudy found himself ousted as spokesperson resulting from his denial of Socialist Realism as the party’s sole artistic principle. After affirming what he believed was the open policy of the Communist Party on aesthetic issues – ‘Il n’y a pas une esthétique du parti communiste’ – he was forced out of his position by Aragon, who took Garaudy’s argument to task (Garaudy, 1946: 17). Calling his article a ‘fantaisie personnelle’ – that is, arguing that he spoke not for the party but only for himself – Aragon assailed Garaudy for suggesting that he would admit any aesthetic into the French Communist canon. In Aragon’s opinion, this is where his former comrade faltered: ‘Si toutes les esthétiques sont bonnes, comment se fait-il que Garaudy ait attaqué à plusieurs reprises l’existentialisme avec une fougue dont je ne blâmerai pas? Un communiste peut-il être surréaliste à proprement parler?’ (Aragon, 1946: 1, original emphasis). Aragon then dryly footnoted his interrogation with a corresponding question: ‘Je demande: peut-il, lui est-il possible d’être surréaliste? Je ne demande pas si cela [Garaudy] est permis’ (Aragon, 1946: 4, original emphasis). Aragon’s animosity towards Surrealism unmistakably biased these statements; his comments also neatly frame the debates and circumscribe the significant parties. Among all of the other groups vying for attention and position in the post-war period, Aragon focused exclusively on that which separated Communist aesthetics from those of the Existentialists and Surrealists. Aragon triangulated the cultural power struggle as one fought between the two inter-war entities – the PCF and the Surrealists – and the newly influential Existentialism of Les Temps modernes.

‘State controlled academic art’: Breton remained unambiguous in his characterisation of the Communist style. Along with his scorn for the Stalinist system that inspired it, the poet recognised in the systematic adoption of Socialist Realism the sacrifice of artistic liberty on the altar of politics. Breton protested the lack of artistic independence and mocked the ‘bombastic asininity’ of subjects assigned to painters in Hungary, such as ‘The first tractor arrives in the village’ and ‘The preparations for Stalin’s birthday’ (Breton, 1993b [1952]: 259–60). But his sarcasm gave way to political and cultural reality: the Socialist Realist scheme represented the ‘systematic destruction [and] eradication by all means of what through the centuries we have learned to consider as art worthy of that name and most particularly of what can correspond to the concept of a living art’ (Breton, 1993b [1952]: 263, original emphasis). In contrast to its imposed restrictions and dictated roles for artists, Breton’s opposition to Socialist Realism hinged on his sacrosanct regard for the freedom of the artist and the responsibility of art in a free society. ²³

The oppositional stance of the PCF vis-à-vis Surrealism was not limited to questions of style. Events of the previous decade – the expulsion of the Surrealists from the party, the Surrealists’ subsequent embrace of Trotskyism and their absence during the Occupation – laid the political groundwork for their interactions after the war. Communist Party followers and fellow travellers loudly proclaimed Surrealism as the Other of post-war France, and opened a gulf between Surrealism and the needs and morality of everyday life. French Communists consequently undertook an offensive against the Surrealists, with Tristan Tzara, a former Dada and Surrealist colleague of Breton’s turned Stalinist, delivering the opening barrage. The choice of Tzara was no coincidence: he was a fixture among Surrealist circles throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Having supported the expulsion of Louis Aragon from Surrealism in 1932, he publically separated himself from the group in 1935, aligned himself firmly with the French Communist Party, and intensified an already existing distrust of Breton. ²⁴ With fellow former Surrealists Aragon and Éluard, Tzara participated actively in the Resistance by contributing to clandestine publications and working for the Comité national des écrivains, the underground organisation for writers. ²⁵ In his capacity as a public Communist intellectual, he lectured at the Sorbonne on ‘Le Surréalisme et l’après-guerre’ in March 1947. ²⁶ This speech addressed Tzara’s theories about Surrealism and his well-founded doubts about its commitment to the Communist cause. ²⁷ Accompanied by several colleagues, Breton attended the talk and interrupted the speaker repeatedly from the audience, a typically Dadaist intervention described by onlookers as violent and tumultuous. ²⁸

Tzara opposed Surrealism to a proper means of literary and artistic expression in the unique reality of post-war France, an environment in which intellectuals held the responsibility for detecting and preventing a Fascist resurgence. Surrealism, according to Tzara, was simply not up to the task. It remained entrapped in the inter-war period, when Fascism had taken root. While acknowledging that Surrealist art had made contributions of ‘la plus haute valeur’, the poets and artists had failed in their most basic quest: the reconciliation of ‘action et rêve’. ‘En d’autres mots’, Tzara explained: ‘l’action révolutionnaire – je parle d’action sur le terrain aussi bien pratique qu’idéologique – et la poésie, devaient avoir une commune mesure, une unique racine, un seul aboutissant: la libération d’homme’ (Tzara, 1966: 25). Summoning the patriotism of the audience, Tzara argued against embracing Surrealism since ‘il a été absent de cette guerre, absent de nos cœurs et de notre action pendant l’occupation’ (1966: 28). France had changed and therefore ‘l’histoire a dépassé le Surréalisme, car le monde ne saurait se fixer sur des positions immutables’ (1966: 28). In his view, with no means at hand to reconcile ideology and poetry, Surrealism had become irrelevant.

For Tzara, the powerful experience of the Resistance acted as a tabula rasa that freed the participants from a stultifying past and left non-participants powerless to face a new future. In contrast to Sartre’s aversion to poetry, Tzara embraced resistance verse, with its straightforward emphasis on camaraderie, engagement and bravery. Fighting the Fascist occupiers had inspired even the most obscure poets, who ‘ont trouvé, pendant la Résistance la juste expression de l’âme populaire … Ce sont les poètes nouveaux qui ont pu cristalliser l’idée de la Résistance et lui communiquer la force d’entraînement qui a secoué les consciences et éclairé les indécis’ (1966: 40). ²⁹ Tzara privileged Resistance poets over their hopelessly esoteric Surrealist predecessors and over flimsy academic poetry, and asserted that they formed a bulwark against a Fascist resurgence. At the same time, he staked out a position of moral clarity for the PCF even as he acknowledged the instability of terms like ‘liberté’ and ‘action’, contrasting the Marxist view of liberty with capitalist liberty and understanding Existentialist action as less concrete than Communist action.

As vindictive and calculated as this criticism appears, in the post-war épuration context his argument against and scrutiny of Surrealism progressed in a judicial manner (with Tzara as prosecutor and Surrealism as the already guilty defendant). Although Surrealism had endured comparable attacks in the inter-war years, the special circumstances of the period from the defeat of France in 1940 to the liberation lent malice to the condemnation. ‘The experience of occupation and resistance’, argues Tony Judt, ‘taught the overwhelming importance of choice and commitment and the weight that would attach to the way in which one expressed these’ (Judt, 1992: 56–7). Individuals whose wartime actions were beyond reproach felt free to judge their peers and, continues Judt, ‘the best way to establish such credentials … was to turn the full force of their self-ascribed moral authority upon their enemies and never to flinch from the firmness of their position’ (Judt, 1992: 57). Not simply a dismissal, then, nor a balanced examination, Tzara’s indictment of Surrealism castigates the movement for its lack of commitment in order to ratify his own group’s relevance and vigour. Surrealist actions and opinions were impotent, according to Tzara, since those who experienced the war from the ‘quais de la Seine’ (that is, in Paris) possessed a more valid and authentic perspective than those who watched it comfortably from the ‘quais de Brooklyn’ and judged it ‘du haut de la Statue de Liberté’. ³⁰ The perceived cowardice of the exiled Surrealists lent itself to vulgar gendered characterisations: Jean Kanapa, one of the most vocal Communist commentators on French culture, lauded Tzara for observing that: ‘Le surréalisme est une peau morte de la culture moderne. Ou si l’on préfère, une vieille peau’ (Kanapa, 1948: 3). ³¹

Collectively, the Surrealist group in Paris responded to Tzara’s attacks in a declaration titled Rupture inaugurale, signed in June 1947 by no fewer than 50 old guard and new members. International signatories included Victor Brauner, Matta, Jacques Hérold, Toyen, Jerzy Kujawski (a Polish abstract painter who moved to Paris in 1945), Antonio Dacosta (a Portuguese Surrealist), Riopelle, and other new adherents to the group. Famous for its last line, ‘le Surréalisme est ce qui sera’, the declaration defends against the attacks launched by Tzara and PCF spokesmen and discredits the revolutionary credentials of the French Communists as well as Sartre. Rupture inaugurale recalls the party’s ills of the 1930s – the Moscow trials and the debacle of the civil war in Spain – and asserts that in pandering to the ruling classes, the PCF betrayed its roots and would be antithetical to ‘l’expérience politique du Surréalisme’. The declaration blames the short-sighted Communists for seeking only the economic liberation of workers in the form of a proletarian revolution. Such a goal should be tempered, the Surrealists declare, since ‘toutes réserves étant faites cependant sur la dégénérescence de la Dictature du Prolétariat en dictature d’un parti.’ (Rupture inaugurale, 1947: 6) Viewing such a revolution as only a means, rather than a desired end, the Surrealist group offers a corrective. The perfectibility of mankind’s fate was indeed connected to economic considerations, but it was tied up:

plus intimement encore à la résolution de conflits qui barrent la route à toute liberté, tells ceux du rêve et de l’action, du merveilleux et du contingent, de l’imaginaire et du réel…cas particuliers d’une antinomie plus large opposant, pour la plus grande détresse de l’homme, le désir à la nécessité. (1947: 11)

For the signatories of Rupture inaugurale, the post-war world of either/or, with its stark judgements about morality, right and wrong, was tragically misguided, a view that separated them from much of intellectual France but earned them praise from thinkers such as Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. The signatories considered the reconciliation of conflicts to be an essential human quality. The revolution did not have to be sterile; indeed, ‘Le rêve et la révolution sont faits pour pactiser, non pour s’exclure. Rêver la Révolution, ce n’est pas y renoncer, mais la faire doublement et sans réserves mentales’ (1947: 14).

With the liberation of the mind, the Surrealists believed, naively perhaps, that society would undergo a similarly profound renewal. Despite the upheavals of war and its aftermath, this worldview remained remarkably consistent. France’s war with Algeria (1954–62) provided the context for a reassertion of established Surrealist anti-colonialist sentiment, this time shared with their former foes. Significantly, this represents the moment when the boundaries among the Communists, Existentialists and Surrealists drawn in the immediate post-war period begin to collapse. A collective statement, Declaration on the right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, also known as the Pétition des 121 (named for the number of signatories), brought together Breton, Masson, Sartre, Beauvoir and Michel Leiris, even Tzara. Evoking Occupation-era patriotism to oppose French aggression in Algeria, the declaration noted that: ‘Once more, with no need of organisation or pre-established slogans, a resistance has been born through a spontaneous assumption of conscience, seeking and inventing forms of action and means of struggle’ (Pétition des 121, 1960: 196). ³² While mythologising the spontaneity of the anti-war opposition, this passage reveals the staying power and continued appeal of Surrealism. Absent during the Occupation, a fact loudly proclaimed by Sartre and Tzara at the time, the Surrealists now formed the core of another French resistance.

It is perhaps difficult to precisely gauge the collective effect of the post-war campaign against Surrealism waged by Sartre, Aragon and Tzara on the group’s fortunes, and to measure the extent to which their endeavours excluded the Surrealists from positions of cultural power. For a while, their efforts to marginalise the Surrealists worked, since it influenced scholarship on Surrealism in the decades following the war. Despite the later reconciliation with former adversaries, from the time Nadeau’s study went public in 1945, histories of post-World War II Surrealism largely focused on the disintegration of a cohesive movement. ³³ Surveys of modern art and writing generally feature large sections on inter-war Surrealism but rarely include any examples from the mid 1940s on.

The final verdict on post-war Surrealism, however, has yet to be written. Several recent studies have recuperated Surrealist activities, documents, artistic output and exhibition practice after 1940 and have examined the importance of its post-war position. ³⁴ Additionally, and significantly, a major cultural force in the post-Liberation period included past Surrealists who contributed to popular culture. For example, the poet Jacques Prévert, who was active in Surrealist circles in the 1920s, wrote film scripts and his poems were performed by singers such as Édith Piaf and Juliette Gréco. Léo Malet, a more recent adherent to Surrealism who worked with the Main à Plume group in wartime Paris, gained fame after the war as a detective novelist whose stories were later adapted for television. Prévert, Malet and other former Surrealists helped to shape the parameters and aesthetics of an increasingly expanding post-war mass French culture. In this ongoing debate, we can say with certainty that in order to strategically position themselves within the intellectual field of post-war France, the Existentialists and the French Communist Party worked to define their beliefs and the parameters of their groups. Often, they used Surrealist principles as points of comparison, which they discussed at length in very public forums. Their engagement with the tenets of Breton, Bataille and their colleagues, if only to vehemently deny them, revealed the continued relevance of Surrealism.