I’m an asocial rebel and a revolutionary dreamer,” she writes, “and do not fit any political party; my religion is paganism, including inspired figures such as Socrates, Buddha, and Kropotkin; and my (dialectical) method of thinking is taken from Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx. We, poets, do not admit the divine right of force; we love to challenge natural and political forces. Without this love of revolution, which has no sex or fatherland, I would have died of hatred or greed.
Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun (born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, 1894-1954) – french surrealist poet, sculptor, photographer, essayist and militant anti-fascist – is one of the most striking figures in the history of the surrealist movement, for having embraced as few others the conviction that surrealism was above all a revolutionary form of life. And she would pursue this throughout her life with the artist and her partner, Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, 1892 – 1972).
Cahun’s political engagements did not however limit themselves to “traditional” forms of leftist-radical political organisation, for her “art” sought to give expression to a politics of “intimacy” or “affect” that addressed, for example, sexuality and gender identity. And if we read her “politics” within the context of André Breton’s essay Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object, we may take Cahun’s art-life as the conscious endeavour to create her-self surreally.
To continue our celebration of Surrealism, on this the one hundredth anniversary of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism, we share below Michael Löwy’s excellent essay on Claude Cahun, an essay published in his collection of essays, Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia (University of Texas Press, 2009).
Claude Cahun: The Extreme Point of the Needle
Artists are often outsiders and transgressors. But few of them concentrate so much of “the outsider” as Claude Cahun (1894–1954): non-Jewish Jewess, androgynous woman, dissident Marxist, lesbian Surrealist, she is strictly unclassifiable. Born Lucy Schwob, the granddaughter of a rabbi from Frankfurt, the daughter of journalist Maurice Schwob, and the niece of Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, author of the Livre de Monelle—one of André Breton’s favorite pieces—she picked a gender-neutral first name, Claude, and the family name of her grandmother Mathilde Cahun. Although she did not receive a Jewish education (her mother was gentile), she was fully aware of her father’s family background and of the strong Jewish identity of her pen name, Cahun, a variant of Cohen.[1] Her childhood friendship with Suzanne Malherbe grew into a lifelong love attachment; her companion became her half-sister when, after Lucy’s mother’s death, her father married Suzanne’s mother. Cahun’s art has been recently rediscovered, and her Surrealist photographic compositions have now become known worldwide. Many of them are strange and disquieting self-portraits, almost always with her hair shaved, while others are marvelous montages of images or objects.
What I want to discuss in this short essay is a less-known aspect of her life and work: her political commitment, her Marxist writings, and her contribution to Surrealist thought on poetry. Until very recently, her writings had been dispersed, out of print, and very hard to find.
Thanks to François Leperlier they have now (2002) been collected, together with many previously unpublished autobiographical notebooks, giving us for the first time a general view of her literary and political evolution and of her Marxist/Surrealist thinking. As we shall see, André Breton admired her as much, if not more, for her writing as for her photographic art.
Claude Cahun’s sudden turn toward Surrealism and revolutionary politics took place in 1932—a belated one, compared to the other Surrealists. It was also a rather unexpected one, considering the literary pieces she had published up until then. It is true that she had, in the late 1920s, friendly relations with the Communist editors of the Journal Philosophies—Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman, and Georges Politzer—as well as with some former Surrealists, including Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Robert Desnos.
It is also possible that as a “sexual dissident” she sympathized with political movements that challenged both the established forms of family and the traditional religious morals. However, there is little in her earlier writings that points in the direction of either Marxism or Surrealism. Neither Vues et Visions (1919), a collection of Symbolist-inspired archaic narratives magnificently illustrated with drawings by Marcel Moore—Suzanne Malherbe’s pen name—nor her powerful autobiographical essay Aveux non avenus (1930) contain any reference to revolution. At best, one can see in her fascination for ancient Rome and Greece a distaste—shared by many Romantics and Symbolists—for modern civilization. This piece from 1930 seems to be entirely narcissistic and inspired by “self-love,” but one begins to see a radicalism emerging: “I would like to sew, to sting, to kill, only at most extreme point. . . . To journey only in the direction of my own prow.” Further, there is her confession that points toward a burning aspiration for radical change: “I spent 33 years of my life desiring passionately, blindly, that things be different from what they are.”[2]
In autobiographical notes written after World War II she acknowledges that she discovered “historicity” only belatedly, around 1931, as “the essential reply of the Sphinx to my personal enigma.”[3] The reasons she and her friend Suzanne Malherbe decided to join the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) remain mysterious. Perhaps it had to do with her growing interest in Surrealism and with the fact that André Breton and his friends, who had tried to join AEAR ever since its founding in January 1932, were finally admitted in October of that year. What is certain is that her new writings show that she moved away from the metaphysical modes of Symbolism with its frenetic idealism; and from a radical pessimism inspired by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to a heterodox version of historical materialism.[4]
Her name appears with those of the Surrealists who signed two important tracts of AEAR: “Protest!” (March 1933), which denounced the triumph of Fascism in Germany and called for “a united front of all workers to aid the German proletariat”; and “Against fascism but also against French imperialism!” (May 1933), which criticized the “common aims of all capitalist exploiters.” This does not mean that Claude Cahun agreed with every proposition of AEAR’s official leadership. She rejected Paul Vaillant-Couturier’s proposition to join bourgeois literary institutions such as the Société des gens de lettres, commenting ironically, “If them, why not the French Academy?”[5]
An individualist and libertarian character like Claude Cahun could not accept the authoritarian Marxism represented by the leadership of AEAR. She soon joined the Trotskyist opposition inside the association, represented by the Brunet group. These young writers were a small faction who sympathized with Surrealism— Jean Legrand, Neocles Coutouzis, Pierre Caminade. She became particularly attached to the Greek medical student and film critic Coutouzis and his companion, Lilette Richter.[6]
In an autobiographical sketch from 1945–1946, she refers to Coutouzis as her teacher in Marxism and the history of the Russian revolution. However, there was a substantial distance between her and the Brunet group; she was not at ease in their favorite field, discursive rationality, and some of them criticized her “sentimentalism.” Her closest affinities were with the Surrealists rather than with any political group: “I chose the month of March 1932 to put myself at the service of the Surrealist group.”[7] She probably meant “March 1933,” since she met André Breton at the beginning of that year. A few months later, in June 1933, Breton was expelled from AEAR. Right after that the Brunet group, Claude Cahun, and the rest of the Surrealists were also expelled. She summarized her oppositional stand as a struggle between democratic and bureaucratic beliefs.[8]
In 1934, inspired by Surrealism, she decided to write her first Marxist piece, Les Paris sont ouverts (Bets Are On). “To base my arguments on Surrealism,” she wrote, “seemed self-evident to me.”[9] The pamphlet was written as an internal report for the literary section of AEAR (January 1933) and completed for publication with new arguments in February 1934. It is a passionate defense of the autonomy of poetry (represented by Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and the Surrealists) against bureaucratic attempts to submit art to “ideological conformity,” which was illustrated by Louis Aragon, who wrote poems celebrating the Stalinist USSR. In 1931 Aragon had broken with his Surrealist friends and offered his unconditional support for the official Soviet cultural policy. The front cover of Cahun’s pamphlet featured a quote by André Breton referring to art as “objective humor,” while the back cover featured a few ridiculous quotes from Aragon. Cahun denounced Aragon not only because he was a renegade from Surrealism, but also because of his Stalinist attitudes: “Anything that does not have the permission of a bureaucrat is suspect and ‘plays into the hands of fascism.’” In Red Front (1931) Aragon called for “shooting Leon Blum” and “the wise bearers of social-democracy” (an example of Third Period Stalinism that denounced social-democracy as social-fascism). At that time Cahun supported a policy of a workers’ united front. Beyond the polemic with Aragon, it was the entire Stalinist ideology, which reduced Marxism to “a mechanical and sterile materialism,” that she rejected. She had nothing but contempt for Stalin, whom she ironically called “the brilliant chief” and “the beloved guide” (521). Above all she hoped that “the world proletariat will break this horrid spell, this bureaucratic obscurantism which maintains itself only by mass exclusions.”
Cahun’s political views in 1934 were ahead of the Surrealists, who collectively did not break with Stalinism until August 1935. Her views were explicitly shared, in 1934, only by Benjamin Péret, who had joined the Left Opposition in the late 1920s.[10] Little wonder that the pamphlet is dedicated “To Leon Trotsky” (though not for any directly political reason but because he showed sympathy for Mayakowsky). In her later recollections she insisted that the document owed much to Coutouzis—she described it as a “synthesis between our two cultures”—and gave an interesting explanation for the dedication: “I was moved by the fate of an erring Jew [Mayakowsky] with a passport who could get no visa.”[11]
The true topic of the polemic is not politics as such, but the struggle against the bureaucratic control over poetry: “The requirement of ideological conformity is the negation of poetry itself.” True poetry does not obey any external commands, but is the free expression of individuals “in their secret innermost self,” the result of “the spontaneous force of emotion of personal or collective life.”[12] One finds in such views anarchist individualism or subjectivism, not unlike the call of the Breton/Trotsky Manifesto of 1938: “Absolute freedom for art!”
Following Tristan Tzara (at this time still in the Surrealist group) she proposed a distinction between the latent (i.e., unconscious) and the manifest content of a poem. Only the first she considered relevant and valuable. Revolutionary propaganda should not take the form of poems, but of conscious prose discourse, as in journalism or political speeches.[13] Although she did not mention it, she was influenced by an article of Tzara in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (December 1931) in which he argued for the Romantic definition of poetry and the Surrealist revolution of the mind against the old and superseded understanding of poetry as simply a means of expression.
How does poetry influence its readers? In a strikingly original argument, Cahun saw two forms of poetic action:
1. Direct action: that of “the great moralizing and usually rhyming poetry,” such as revolutionary songs (the Marseillaise), but also catechisms, prayers, proverbs, and axioms, as well as commercial and ideological advertisement. In biting irony, she gave the latest ads as examples of: “Every elegant woman is a client of Le Printemps” and “Your Fatherland is the USSR, one sixth of the planet.” She compared this pseudopoetry, again mentioning Aragon, to “revolutionary masturbation.”
2. Indirect action: which allows the reader to reach his own conclusions, “Follow desire [Laisser à désirer], said Breton.” It suggests the dialectical idea, (i.e., provoking a contradiction), as Rimbaud did when he wrote in mocking language of the rabid imperialists, “In our guts we nourish the most cynical prostitution. We massacre our logic that is in revolt against us. In the countries sun-peppered and rain-drenched!—In the service of the most monstrous industrial and military exploitations.”[14] This indirect action is the only one that seemed to her legitimate, both in political and poetical terms.
The second part of her essay began with a polemic against Aragon, who in an article of October 1933 stated that “abstract” poetry, unlike proletarian poetry, can “become a snare, a machine gun or a poison in the service of the ruling class.” Cahun replied that writing cannot become a weapon in the hands of the enemy. True poetry, the kind that “keeps its secret,” is like “the paving stones.” In street battles they can be used by the revolutionaries rather than by the police.[15]
She compared Aragon’s “beautiful” poetry to his “Red, white, and blue” propaganda verses and to those of Péret, Crevel, and Breton. Her conclusion was that true poetry is subversive and that there is nothing in the world that can reduce it to a mercenary, low-level “role” like that played by propaganda “poetry.”[16]
Curiously, toward the end of the essay she quoted a document by her Marxist friends (with whom she obviously did not agree); their argument was poor and mechanical and attempted to find “the class basis of poetic inspiration” and defined Surrealism as the road to “the end of poetry.” Cahun commented that poetry can cease to exist only when it is made by all human beings (531).
Poetry for her was not the product of any “class basis” but a permanent dimension of human life. Something which “has existed in history at all times and places” and which “undeniably seems to be a need inherent to human nature . . . a need linked to the sexual instinct.” She emphasized, “If poetical specialization leads to its own ruin, this is not because poetry will disappear. On the contrary. It is because it ‘shall be done by all, not by one’ (Lautréamont)” (507).
In a “Post-Script,” she compared poetry to science and philosophy, as an “agent of change” which intervenes everywhere, “provoking human consciousness, causing some short-circuits—‘magical’ shortcuts which sexual love and extreme suffering also know the ‘secret of.’”
The essay used several quotes by Marx, Engels, and even Lenin that sometimes seem out of focus. The most important is a quote from Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, in which he argued in answer to Proudhon, “What provokes dialectical progress is the co-existence of two opposed elements, their antagonism and their absorption by a new category. As soon as one poses the problem of suppressing one side, the dialectical movement stops.” This quote introduces the second part of her essay and inspired her attempt to interpret poetry dialectically. While her politics in this pamphlet are obviously Marxist, her reflections on poetry owe more to Romanticism, Symbolism, and Hegelian aesthetics than to the vulgar Marxism which ruled in France. The few exceptions were Norbert Guterman, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Naville.[17] By emphasizing the anthropological nature of poetry, its intimate link to erotic feelings, its magical power, and its capacity to produce emotional breakthroughs, she raised the issue to a much higher level in true Surrealist spirit.
Claude Cahun’s beginnings in the Surrealist group were rather uneasy. Her provocative behavior, shaving her head and painting it rose or gold, dressing as a man and wearing a monocle, did not pass unnoticed and was received with mixed feelings. Her appearance can be considered as an expression of rebel queer (lesbian) consciousness, taking the form of eccentricity, rejection of assigned identities, and constant reinvention of self.[18] In any case, attitudes changed after the publication of her pamphlet in 1934, which was celebrated as “remarkable” by Breton in his essay “Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme?” A year later, in Minotaure, he again referred to her essay: “In the recent polemics with Aragon, Claude Cahun has presented conclusions that for a long time will be the most valid.”[19]
She soon became friends not only with the author of the Surrealist Manifestoes and his companion, Jacqueline Lamba, but also with René Crevel, Salvador Dali, and Benjamin Péret. Further, her polemical tract became the main reference for the Surrealists on the controversial issue of poetry’s relation to revolutionary politics. It is noteworthy that André Breton admired not only her photographs but also her writing; a letter from September 21, 1938, showed his high opinion of her and he encouraged her to speak out: “It seems you are endowed with extensive powers. I think (and will keep repeating it to you) that you must write and publish. You know very well that I consider you one of the most inquiring minds of our time (one of the 4 or 5) but you find pleasure in keeping silent.”[20]
Breton’s admiration was fully justified; Cahun’s pamphlet was not just a restatement of his views, as well as those of Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, and other Surrealists, but also an original, if polemical, exploration of the meaning of poetry and its significance for the revolution. It was a pathbreaking piece, anticipating future documents of the Surrealist movement. In fact, her unique blend of Romantic, Hegelian, Surrealist, and Marxist arguments is still, in this new century, thought provoking.
During the next three years, Claude Cahun linked herself to the Surrealist group and personally to André Breton. In 1935 she attended the Congress for the Defense of Culture (convened in Paris by anti-Fascist writers [Gide, Malraux], but under the hegemony of the Communist Party) “to support the Surrealists and the Anarchists who were defending Victor Serge.”[21] Surprisingly, she did not sign any of the Surrealist collective declarations from 1934 and 1935, including the break with the official Communist movement in August 1935, which followed Breton’s exclusion from the Cultural Congress.
It was only in autumn 1935, with the formation of the ill-fated journal Counterattack (an effort of Breton and Bataille), that her name appeared among the signers. She was attracted by Bataille’s revolutionary pessimism and his attempt to combine Nietzsche and Marx, and she liked the “revolutionary defeatist” line of the new initiative, which she thought corresponded to the position of the Left Opposition. According to the notes she took of a meeting in 1936, she insisted that “revolution must be permanent or it will not be viable. It will be made by human beings who aspire to a complete liberation.”[22]
Counterattack was a confused political initiative that attempted to fight Fascism by organized means based on “discipline” and “fanaticism” and was inspired by a strange mixture of Jacobin dictatorship and Nietzschean aristocracy. In March 1936, Breton and his friends, including Claude Cahun, left Counterattack, reaffirming the Surrealists’ belief that one needed struggle against Fascism through the “revolutionary traditions of the international labor movement.”[23]
During 1936, Claude Cahun took an active part in Surrealist activities: she was present at the Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and London and signed the collective appeal “No Freedom for the Enemies of Freedom” (written by Henri Pastoureau and Leo Malet), which denounced the Fascist coup in Spain and the passive attitude of the French Popular Front government. However, in July 1937 she and her companion, Suzanne Malherbe, decided to leave Paris and live on the Channel Island of Jersey. She did not sever her connections with the Surrealist group, and in 1938 she joined the International Federation for an Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI). In June 1939 she signed the last declaration of the FIARI, “A bas les lettres de cachet! A bas la terreur grise!,” which was also the last collective manifestation of the Surrealists before the war and the dispersal of the group. In 1940, with the beginning of World War II and the occupation of the Channel Islands by the Third Reich, a new chapter in Claude Cahun’s political and intellectual life began, perhaps the most astonishing and impressive of all: anti-Fascist Resistance.
When the German troops arrived, Cahun’s first impulse was to shoot the Kommandant; she took a small revolver and went to the woods to do target practice. However, she was too inexperienced, and Suzanne convinced her that she would miss her target. They decided to start a subversive activity addressed to German soldiers to incite them to insubordination.
From 1941 to 1944, for four years, they issued, mainly in German (Suzanne translated), thousands of anti-Fascist leaflets, posters, and fliers aimed at sowing trouble and demoralization among the occupiers. Claude Cahun also produced photomontages using images cut from the Nazi magazine Signal and sometimes took her inspiration from John Hartzfeld’s well-known anti-Fascist works, which had been exhibited in Paris in 1935. Humor, play, allegory, nostalgia, absurdity, the marvelous, and irony were their main weapons in this unequal struggle against the most powerful war machine of Europe.
Their fliers contained anti-Nazi and antimilitarist slogans, such as “Liebknecht-Frieden-Freiheit,” uncensored information, songs, manifestoes, theatrical dialogues, images, and wordplay and were usually signed the “Nameless Soldier.”[24] One of their fliers, which enraged the occupying authorities, directly called on the soldiers to rebel and to desert and advised them that if their officers attempted to stop them, to shoot their officers. Some of the material was handwritten on cardboard cigarette paper wrappers. They also wrote “Down with War” on French money. Usually, however, Cahun made twelve carbon copies of each flier with her Underwood typewriter and illustrated them with images made of typewriter letters and graphic signs. Then they attached the fliers to walls, doors, barbed wire, and parked cars or hid them inside newspapers and magazines on the newsstands or left them in mailboxes, churches, and houses used by the Nazis.
Their daring behavior, right under the noses of the Gestapo and the occupying forces, can best be described by the Yiddish word chutzpa, insolence.[25] Summarizing the spirit of her struggle, she wrote after the war, “I committed myself to revolutionary defeatism, trying to convince the German soldiers to turn against their officers. We fought for a rainbow of values stretching from the ultraromantic black to the flaming red. We fought for the Germans against Nazi Germany. We fought as Surrealist writers with weapons of chance.”[26]
And in a letter from 1950 she explains that what stimulated her to resist was her leftist, pacifist, Surrealist, and even “Communist (historical materialism)” ideas as well as the need to defend particular values, “such as freedom of expression and sexual freedom [liberté des moeurs] that were of personal concern to me.”[27] During those four years the angry, frustrated Gestapo agents searched in vain for the dangerous “Nameless Soldier,” who sabotaged the morale of the troops and preached rebellion in every corner of the small island.
Finally, someone, probably the shopkeeper who sold them the cigarette papers, denounced the two women, and on July 25, 1944, they were arrested. Trying to save her friend, Claude Cahun told the Gestapo officers, “I’m the only one responsible. I did the photomontages and wrote the fliers. Moreover, I’m Jewish on my father’s side.” As soon as they were jailed, both women tried to commit suicide by swallowing Gardenal pills they kept with them for just such an eventuality. The attempt failed, but they were seriously ill for some time, and this probably saved them from being deported to Germany.
At first, the Nazi secret police could not believe these two kind, middle-aged ladies were the firebrands responsible for all the subversive agitation and thought they were agents of some “foreign” power. When they at last became convinced, after searching their house and finding all the materials, they convened a military court. The German prosecutor, Major Sarmser, argued that they were illegal partisan fighters, using spiritual weapons that were more dangerous than guns. He also insisted that their flier calling on the German soldiers to rid themselves of their officers was “incitement to murder.”
The military court predictably sentenced them both to death. The two women were to be sent to Germany to be beheaded with an axe, the Third Reich’s treatment for dangerous anti-Fascist enemies whose death they intended to serve as an example. However, due to the liberation of France in the summer of 1944 the Channel Islands were cut off from Germany, and the deportation could not take place.
Seeing that the war was lost, the local commanders were afraid of reprisals and did not want to take the responsibility for an odious execution on the island itself. They told the two women that if they wrote to the German authorities asking to be pardoned, they could save their heads, thanks to the merciful policy of the Third Reich. To their dismay and surprise, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe obstinately refused to sign an appeal for pardon: they considered it dishonorable to ask favors of the Third Reich! The embarrassed local commanders were then forced to sign the appeal themselves, and the two proud anti-Fascist resisters were “pardoned” and sentenced to life imprisonment. During their time in the military prison they discovered that many German soldiers were jailed for trying to desert or for insubordination, a situation they attributed, at least in part, to their antiwar propaganda. Finally, on the last day of the war, May 8, 1945, they were liberated, in poor health but alive.[28]
The history of anti-Fascist Resistance in France has many impressive episodes, but this story of two women, a Surrealist artist and her companion, challenging the Third Reich for four years, all alone, sowing trouble and discontent among the occupiers with an old Underwood typewriter, is certainly one of the most moving ones. Claude Cahun never published anything about her Resistance activities; all the information was found in her notebooks and in letters to her friends Gaston Ferdière (1946) and Paul Levy (1950), posthumously collected by François Leperlier in the volume Ecrits.
These notebooks are also interesting because they contain remarks on her philosophical, political, and social views, in her very personal and unconventional style. “I’m an asocial rebel and a revolutionary dreamer,” she writes, “and do not fit any political party; my religion is paganism, including inspired figures such as Socrates, Buddha, and Kropotkin; and my (dialectical) method of thinking is taken from Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx. We, poets, do not admit the divine right of force; we love to challenge natural and political forces. Without this love of revolution, which has no sex or fatherland, I would have died of hatred or greed.”[29] The simultaneous mention of Kropotkin and Marx points to the kind of libertarian Marxist thinking she shared with André Breton and Benjamin Péret.
Pessimism had always been a key component of Cahun’s sensibility, nourished by readings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but it never led her to resignation: “My ‘despair’ did not prevent me from acting under the sign of crystal and the blue of dawn.” Nothing was further from her character than the passive acceptance of “reality”; she strongly believed that “the right to resist . . . natural and social evils is the first among human rights.” In the notebook in which she wrote down these comments one finds also a statement of her self-emancipatory socialist views: “A human being can be destroyed from outside” in the Nazi concentration camps, which destroyed people’s emotions, mental capacities, consciousness, and will before destroying their lives.
However, the individual “can only be built from inside, in exercising individual freedom, through one’s own efforts. . . . It seems that free will cannot be scientifically demonstrated. I don’t give a damn! . . . The time has come to keep the promises that were made from revolution to revolution, from civilization to civilization, from generation to generation.”[30]
In another of her pieces from 1947, she says, “The partisan takes the responsibility for the end and for the means, for the orders given, for the acts accomplished without strings attached or excuses; he is the outsider on the misty front of the nationalistic wars that are foreign to all humankind, the citizen of the republic humanizing war itself in the civil wars, the still-free human being. He who has given himself a mission does not need to enlist himself.” In this fascinating anarchist-inspired statement one can see both a homage to the French Resistance fighters and a reference to her own struggle in Jersey, and a polemic against the Communist (PCF) and existentialist doctrine of engagement (“enlistment”).
After the war, Claude Cahun reestablished contact with her Surrealist friends; she corresponded with André Breton and Jean Schuster and considered returning to Paris. She wrote several notebooks on her experiences during the war as well as a few poems, one of which, from 1952, is dedicated to Benjamin Péret. In June 1953 she visited Paris and took part in the meetings of the Surrealist group at the Café de la Mairie, where she saw André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Meret Oppenheim, Toyen, and her other friends.
She made up her mind to return to Paris and looked for an apartment in her old neighborhood, Montparnasse, but her health was damaged by the year spent in the jails of the Third Reich, and she died in Jersey on December 8, 1954.
A fascinating and enigmatic figure, Claude Cahun occupies a unique place in the burning black constellation of Surrealist revolutionary spirits. By her thought and her action, she lived and fought at the extreme point of the needle.
Translated by Marie Stuart
[1] One can find some comments on her Jewish background in her later autobiographical notes, “Confidences au Miroir” (unpublished, 1945–1946), Ecrits (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2002), edition established by François Leperlier, 593.
[2] C. Cahun, “Aveux non avenus” (1930), in Ecrits, 178, 428.
[3] C. Cahun, “Feuilles detachees du Scrap Book” (unpublished, 1948–1951), in Ecrits, 659.
[4] See François Leperlier, “L’exotisme interieur,” in Claude Cahun photographe (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1992), 149.
[5] See Leperlier, Cahun, l’ecart et la metamorphose (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1992), 149.
[6] Th is and other biographical information in this essay is borrowed from Leperlier’s excellent book Cahun, l’ecart et la metamorphose.
[7] C. Cahun, “Confi dences au Miroir,” in Ecrits, 579.
[8] “Lettre à Paul Levy” (1950), in Ecrits, 718.
[9] Ibid., 594.
[10] C. Cahun, “Les Paris sont ouverts,” in Ecrits, 522–526.
[11] C. Cahun, “Confidences au Miroir,” in Ecrits, 584.
[12] C. Cahun, “Les Paris sont ouverts,” in Ecrits, 508–509.
[13] Ibid., 510.
[14] Ibid., 511–512, 515.
[15] Ibid., 521.
[16] Ibid., 530.
[17] Of course, neither Marx and Engels, nor Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg, ever thought of reducing art or poetry to a “class mechanism.”
[18] See Diane Lamoureux, “De la tragedie a la rebellion: le lesbianisme a travers l’experience du feminisme radical,” in Tumultes, no. 21–22 (November 2003), 261–262. One should add that Cahun very seldom comments on her lesbianism in her writings, including the intimate notebooks written after the war. But it is quite probable that this was one of the motives of her sociopolitical radicalization.
[19] A. Breton, Qu’est-ce que surrealisme? (Paris: Henriquez, 1934), 28, and “La grande actualite poetique,” Minotaure, no. 6 (1935). Twenty years later, in his well-known radio interview, he still refers to her pamphlet as the most significant image from those years. Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 169.
[20] Quoted by Leperlier, “L’exotisme interieur.”
[21] “Lettre à Paul Levy,” (1950), in Ecrits, 718. Victor Serge, the well-known Russian and “Libertarian Trotskyist” writer, was at that time interned in a prisoners’ camp in the Soviet Union.
[22] C. Cahun, “Reunion de Contre-Attaque” (1936), in Ecrits, 564.
[23] See José Pierre, ed., Tracts surréalistes et declarations collectives (Paris: Losfeld, 1980), 1:301.
[24] C. Cahun, “Le muet dans la melee” (unpublished, 1948), in Ecrits, 629. The slogan called for “Peace and Liberty” and paid homage to Karl Liebknecht, the only socialist member of the German Reichstag who voted against the war credits in 1914—and in 1919 one of the founders of the German Communist Party, assassinated by the military soon afterward.
[25] Unfortunately, they were discovered by the Gestapo, and most of the clandestine participants, which included some German anti-Fascist soldiers, were shot.
[26] C. Cahun, “Confi dences au Miroir,” in Ecrits, 580, 613.
[27] C. Cahun, “Lettre à Paul Levy,” in Ecrits, 713–714. This is, by the way, one of the few passages in her writings that points to her sexual preferences as one of the motives for her revolutionary commitment.
[28] Ibid., 720–750.
[29] C. Cahun, “Le muet dans la melee” (1948), in Ecrits, 634, 644–648.
[30] C. Cahun, “Feuilles detachees du Scrap Book,” in Ecrits, 657–658.
For those who may perhaps be unfamiliar with Claude Cahun’s art-politics, we share below a short list of what may be taken as introductions to her work.
Therese Lichtenstein, “A Mutable Mirror: Claude Cahun”, Art Forum, April 1992.
Georgiana M. M. Colvile, “De l’Éros des femmes surréalistes et de Claude Cahun en particulier” (March 2006), web.archive.org.
Gavin James Bower, “Claude Cahun: Finding a lost great”, The Guardian, 14/02/2012.
Sam Johnson, “Claude Cahun: A Very Curious Spirit”, AnOther, 28/04/2015.
Hugh Ryan, “themstory: Claude Cahun Is the Gender-Nonconforming Anti-Fascist Hero We Deserve”, them, 16/11/2017.
Candy Bedworth, “Claude Cahun. A Surrealist Queer Prophet”, Daily Art Magazine, 22/06/2023.
And for a selection of Claude Cahun’s photograhy, see the collection at artnet.
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