Vol. 72/No. 38      September 29, 2008

BY ANDRÉ BRETON  
Let us be careful, today, not to underestimate the peril: The shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dollfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and more worthy form of existence. The other day I noticed on the front page of a Paris newspaper a photograph of the surroundings of the Lambrechies mine on the day after the catastrophe. This photograph illustrated an article titled, in quotation marks, ‘Only Our Chagrin Remains’. On the same page was another photograph—this one of the unemployed of your country standing in front of a hovel in the Parisian ‘poor zone’—with the caption Poverty is not a crime. ‘How delightful!’ I said to myself, glancing from one picture to the other. Thus the bourgeois public in France is able to console itself with the knowledge that the miners of your country were not necessarily criminals just because they got themselves killed for 35 francs a day. And doubtless the miners, our comrades, will be happy to learn that the committee of the Belgian Coal Association intends to postpone till the day after tomorrow the application of the wage cut set for 20 May.

In capitalist society, hypocrisy and cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion and are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making exaggerated sacrifices to humanitarianism, which always involve impossible reconciliations and truces to the advantage of the stronger, I should say that thought cannot in this atmosphere contemplate the exterior world without immediately shuddering. Everything we know about fascism shows that it is precisely the confirmation of this state of affairs, aggravated to its uttermost by the lasting resignation that it seeks to obtain from those who suffer. Is not the evident role of fascism to re-establish for the time being the tottering supremacy of finance capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to make it deserving of all our hatred. We continue to consider this feigned resignation as one of the greatest evils that can be inflicted on beings of our kind; and those who would inflict it deserve, in our opinion, to be beaten like dogs.

Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact that this immense danger is there, lurking at our doors, that it has made its appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure byzantinism to dispute too long, as in Germany, over the choice of the barrier to be set up against it, when all the while, under several aspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us.

In the course of taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I am capable, to the organisation in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle, I have noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into the intellectual circles of the left as to the possibility of successfully combating fascism, a doubt which has unfortunately infected even those elements whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and who had come to the fore in this struggle. Some of these have even begun to make excuses for the loss of the battle. Such dispositions are so dismaying to me that I would not care to be speaking here without first making clear my position in relation to them, or without anticipating a whole series of remarks that are to follow, affirming that today, more than ever, the liberation of the mind, the express aim of surrealism, demands as a primary condition, in the opinion of the surrealists, the liberation of man, which implies that we must struggle against our fetters with all the energy of despair; that today more than ever the surrealists rely entirely, for the bringing about of human liberation, on the proletarian revolution.

I feel free to turn now to the object of this pamphlet, which is to attempt an explanation of what surrealism is. A certain immediate ambiguity contained in the word surrealism is capable, in fact, of leading one to suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental attitude, when on the contrary it expresses—and always has expressed for us—a desire to deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses. The whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the present day, which I will now attempt to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge; to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to the external consequences; and to assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many years past—or, more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purely intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25)—at the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, of finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement).  
 
 
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