Surrealism As a Romantic Movement

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What is romanticism? It has been reduced to a literary school of the 19th Century, or to a traditionalist reaction against the French Revolution-two propositions found in countless works by eminent specialists in literary history or the history of political thought. Rather, it is a form of sensibility irrigating all fields of culture, a vision of the world which extends from the second half of the 18th Century up to today, a comet whose incandescent “core” is the revolt against modern industrial/capitalist civilization, in the name of certain social or cultural values of the past. Nostalgic for a lost paradise-real or imaginary-romanticism opposes itself, with the melancholic energy of despair, to the quantifying mind of the bourgeois universe, to commercial reification, the platitude of utilitarianism, and above all, to the disenchantment of the world. Surrealism is the most striking and the most fascinating example of a romantic current in the 20th Century. Of all the cultural movements of the era, it is the one which has carried to its highest expression the romantic aspiration to re-enchant the world. It is also the one which has incarnated, in the most radical fashion, the revolutionary dimension of romanticism. The revolt of the mind and the social revolution, change life (Rimbaud) and transform the world (Marx): these are the two polar stars which have oriented the movement since its beginnings, driving it in the permanent investigation of subversive cultural and political practices. At the cost of multiple secessions and defections, the core of the Surrealist group, around André Breton and Benjamin Péret, has never abandoned its intransigent refusal of the established social, moral and political order-nor its jealously-guarded autonomy, despite affiliation or sympathy with different currents of the revolutionary left. This started with Communism (Breton’s
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