André Breton, the Godfather of French Surrealism
The moors have often torn him apart but he loved this light of will-o’-the-wisp that they keep in my core…
Retrospective. Back to 1900. André Breton is fittingly called. The pope of surrealism spent his golden years with his maternal grandparents in Saint-Brieuc. There he encountered the heat that the family home, in Pantin and then Lorient, didn’t give him. His mother, dominating and distant, nipped in the bud all his childish motives.
During this period, André Breton has few emotional memories and will not cease, as a man, to renew with the wonder, audacity and levity that distinguish the young years, lost for him: “It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to real life…”. The war took him away from his medical studies in 1914.
A page that turns
Sent to Nantes as a military infirmarian, he had a crucial first encounter with a young dandy from Lorient, Jacques Vaché. Emulated by Jarry and Apollinaire, Vaché was one of a kind. He epitomized for us the highest power of liberation,” Breton would later write.
A few years later, in 1919, Jacques Vaché, wounded at the front in 1916, died, barely two months after Apollinaire. Despite being somewhat orphaned, the initiative was nonetheless launched and found its definition in 1924 in the “Manifesto”: “pure psychedelic automata through which one aims to express the real workings of thought. »
A theorician above all, not very verbose writer, André Breton made few references to Brittany, except in “Magnetic Fields” and “Stone Language”: “As a child of Brittany, I like the moorlands. Their flower of pauperism is the only one that is not faded in my buttonhole,” wrote Chateaubriand, to whom Breton replied in 1952 (“Entretiens”): “I also take part in these heathlands, they have often shattered me, but I love this flickering light that they maintain in my chest”.
