Surrealism in the Mirror of Anarchism

Louise Michel (1833-1905) waving a black flag inscribed “bread or death”, during the looting of a bakery during the workers’ demonstration of the 9th of March of 1883 in Paris. Artist unknown.

Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure. It can also be an organizer, if ever, as the result of a less intimate disappointment, we contemplate taking it seriously. The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in. Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything! May you only take the trouble to practice poetry.

André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)


Tower of Light [La Claire Tour]

Le Libertaire (1952)

André Breton

It is in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism, long before it achieved self-definition, first recognized its own reflection. This was shortly after World War I and we were still nothing more than a free association of individuals united by our spontaneous rejection of all the social and moral constraints of our times. Among the shrines on which we converged and that could not fail to bring us together there was this conclusion of Ballade Solness by Laurent Tailhade:

Stab our tattered hearts!
Anarchy! Bearer of flaming torches!
Dispel the night! Stamp out the vermin!
And build, sky-high, with our tombstones even,
The Tower of Light that dominates the sea!

At this point, surrealism rejects everything: no political movement could harness its energies. All the institutions on which the modern world is resting and that have led to the First World War we deem aberrant and scandalous. Above all we challenge the whole apparatus society uses to defend itself: the army, the police, “justice,” religion, psychiatric and forensic medicine, education. Our collective declarations as well as the individual texts written by Aragon and Eluard (as we knew them at the time), Artaud, Crevel, Desnos, Ernst, Leiris, Masson, Péret, Queneau, or myself manifest the same common intention to reveal their true nature as corruptions that must be recognized as such and fought against. But in order to fight them with some measure of success, one has to undermine the framework supporting them, which in the final analysis is based on logic and moral sense, both fraudulent labels for, on the one hand, a morality that has been falsified by Christianity so as to deter all resistance against the exploitation of mankind and, on the other hand, for a so-called reason that serves as a poor disguise for the exhausted notion of “common sense.”

A great fire was smoldering then—we were young—and I should emphasize that it has been continually rekindled by what radiates from the Works and lives of poets:

Anarchy! Bearer of flaming torches!

Aside from Tailhade, those poets are Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jarry, and all our young libertarian comrades should know them just as they should know Sade, Lautréamont, and Schwob when he wrote “Paroles de Monelle” [Monelle’s words].

How is it that the organic fusion of the surrealist and (strictly speaking) anarchist elements did not occur at that time? I still ask myself this very same question now, twenty-five years later. It was undoubtedly hindered by the idea of efficiency, which served as the prevailing mirage for that whole period. A whole new change in perspective was brought about by what was believed to be the triumph of the Russian Revolution and the advent of a workers’ State. The only blotch marring this perfect picture—it was to develop into an indelible stain—was the brutal suppression of the Cronstadt uprising of 18 March 1921. The surrealists were never able to forget it entirely. Nevertheless, around 1925, only the Third International seemed to have the requisite means of transforming the world. One could assume that the symptoms of degeneracy and regression already distinctly visible in the East could still be remedied. The surrealists’ behavior at that time rested on the conviction that social revolution, as it spread to all nations, could only promote a libertarian world (some say a surrealist world, but they are one and the same). All of us thought so at first, including those, such as Aragon, Eluard, and so on, who have forsaken their original ideal to the point of carving out a career for themselves within Stalinism, and a fairly good career at that—for businessmen, of course. But human desire and human hope will never be at the mercy of those who betray them:

Dispel the night! Stamp out the vermin!

Everyone knows how ruthlessly those illusions were destroyed during the second quarter of this century. Through some dreadful irony, the libertarian world we had imagined has given way to a world where the most servile obedience is expected, where the most basic human rights are denied, where all social life revolves around the policeman and the executioner. As in all cases where a human ideal reaches such depths of corruption, the only cure is to immerse oneself anew in the great current of sensibility where this ideal originated, to go back to the principles from which it had sprung. Those who complete the journey, one that today it is more than ever imperative to undertake, will discover that anarchism alone is the only remaining solution. Let us dismiss the caricature, the scarecrow we are expected to see: anarchism was best described by our comrade Fontenis “as the very essence of socialism, that is the modern demand for the dignity of man (his freedom as much as his well-being); socialism conceived not simply as a solution to an economic or political problem but as the expression of the exploited masses hankering after a society that will be classless and Stateless, where all human values and aspirations may be realized.”

This idea that revolt and generosity cannot be dissociated and that they both remain equally boundless (whether Albert Camus agrees or not), we surrealists have now adopted as our very own. As it emerges from the deathly mists shrouding our times, we are convinced it is the only idea capable of bringing back within the range of vision of an ever-increasing number of people.

The Tower of Light that dominates the sea!


(Source: André Breton, Free Rein (La Clé des champs), trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise, University of Nebraska Press, 1995)


Liberté (1942)

Paul Éluard

On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sands of snow
I write your name

On the pages I have read
On all the white pages
Stone, blood, paper or ash
I write your name

On the images of gold
On the weapons of the warriors
On the crown of the king
I write your name

On the jungle and the desert
On the nest and on the brier
On the echo of my childhood
I write your name

On all my scarves of blue
On the moist sunlit swamps
On the living lake of moonlight
I write your name

On the fields, on the horizon
On the birds’ wings
And on the mill of shadows
I write your name

On each whiff of daybreak
On the sea, on the boats
On the demented mountaintop
I write your name

On the froth of the cloud
On the sweat of the storm
On the dense rain and the flat
I write your name

On the flickering figures
On the bells of colors
On the natural truth
I write your name

On the high paths
On the deployed routes
On the crowd-thronged square
I write your name

On the lamp which is lit
On the lamp which isn’t
On my reunited thoughts
I write your name

On a fruit cut in two
Of my mirror and my chamber
On my bed, an empty shell
I write your name

On my dog, greathearted and greedy
On his pricked-up ears
On his blundering paws
I write your name

On the latch of my door
On those familiar objects
On the torrents of a good fire
I write your name

On the harmony of the flesh
On the faces of my friends
On each outstretched hand
I write your name

On the window of surprises
On a pair of expectant lips
In a state far deeper than silence
I write your name

On my crumbled hiding-places
On my sunken lighthouses
On my walls and my ennui
I write your name

On abstraction without desire
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name

And for the want of a word
I renew my life
For I was born to know you
To name you

Liberty


Sur mes cahiers d’écolier
Sur mon pupitre et les arbres
Sur le sable sur la neige
J’écris ton nom

Sur toutes les pages lues
Sur toutes les pages blanches
Pierre sang papier ou cendre
J’écris ton nom

Sur les images dorées
Sur les armes des guerriers
Sur la couronne des rois
J’écris ton nom

Sur la jungle et le désert
Sur les nids sur les genêts
Sur l’écho de mon enfance
J’écris ton nom

Sur les merveilles des nuits
Sur le pain blanc des journées
Sur les saisons fiancées
J’écris ton nom

Sur tous mes chiffons d’azur
Sur l’étang soleil moisi
Sur le lac lune vivante
J’écris ton nom

Sur les champs sur l’horizon
Sur les ailes des oiseaux
Et sur le moulin des ombres
J’écris ton nom

Sur chaque bouffée d’aurore
Sur la mer sur les bateaux
Sur la montagne démente
J’écris ton nom

Sur la mousse des nuages
Sur les sueurs de l’orage
Sur la pluie épaisse et fade
J’écris ton nom

Sur les formes scintillantes
Sur les cloches des couleurs
Sur la vérité physique
J’écris ton nom

Sur les sentiers éveillés
Sur les routes déployées
Sur les places qui débordent
J’écris ton nom

Sur la lampe qui s’allume
Sur la lampe qui s’éteint
Sur mes maisons réunies
J’écris ton nom

Sur le fruit coupé en deux
Du miroir et de ma chambre
Sur mon lit coquille vide
J’écris ton nom

Sur mon chien gourmand et tendre
Sur ses oreilles dressées
Sur sa patte maladroite
J’écris ton nom

Sur le tremplin de ma porte
Sur les objets familiers
Sur le flot du feu béni
J’écris ton nom

Sur toute chair accordée
Sur le front de mes amis
Sur chaque main qui se tend
J’écris ton nom

Sur la vitre des surprises
Sur les lèvres attentives
Bien au-dessus du silence
J’écris ton nom

Sur mes refuges détruits
Sur mes phares écroulés
Sur les murs de mon ennui
J’écris ton nom

Sur l’absence sans désir
Sur la solitude nue
Sur les marches de la mort
J’écris ton nom

Sur la santé revenue
Sur le risque disparu
Sur l’espoir sans souvenir
J’écris ton nom

Et par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommer

Liberté.

Paul Eluard

Poésie et vérité 1942 (recueil clandestin)
Au rendez-vous allemand (1945, Les Editions de Minuit)

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