CHARLES FOURIER IN ANDRÉ BRETON

par Henri Béhar

October 17, 2021

Today, to situate the presence of a character in the complete work of an author, there is a very simple method if this work has been digitized. In the present case, it suffices to refer to the Mélusine/Surrealism website, and click on André Breton's index/Concordance. Then, having indicated the name searched for, one obtains about fifty occurrences, with the reference to the work and pagination in the Pléiade edition. It is not possible to obtain the expanded context of each occurrence : the law does not allow me to provide this work before 2036.

I will therefore content myself with briefly situating Charles Fourier in André Breton's work, with minimal commentary. While noting that these references most often refer to very personal works by Breton, and not to manifestos where he expresses himself in the name of surrealism.

I. Fourier in the USA

Since the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, no one doubts the victory. This allows Breton to speak, in Arcane 17, of democratic regimes and parties returned in the baggage of the military without having learned anything or forgotten anything. News begins to arrive directly from liberated France. As special correspondent for the daily Combat, Sartre makes a stay in New York from mid-January 1945. During a fairly long interview with Breton, the latter confirms to him that his old friends Aragon, Éluard, Picasso hold the high ground. The Stalinists seize the information networks. Breton deduces that his return to Europe would be premature.

With peace returned on May 8, 1945, this is the time when Breton becomes passionate about Charles Fourier, the theorist of universal harmony. He is more interested in the thinker of the laws of attraction and analogy than in the economist. His "frenetic" shadow appears in Arcane 17 alongside other socialists. Breton's article on Arshile Gorky, on the occasion of his exhibition at the Julien Lévy gallery in 1945, constitutes the matrix of the Ode to Charles Fourier, through analogy (SP IV 589). The 5 volumes of Fourier's Complete Works accompany him during the journey he makes in the American West with Elisa. They first go to Reno, the gambling capital in Nevada, well known for the facilities it offers to couples wishing to divorce and remarry immediately. AB writes to B. Péret, from Reno, on July 1, 1945 : "I am spending a few weeks in Reno, which is the minimum time required by the divorce procedure. I therefore announce to you by this letter my marriage to Elisa which will take place on July 30 very exactly. From there we will return to New York via Arizona and New Mexico so as to be able to attend some Indian festivals." (Correspondance, p. 230)

He then undertakes a long poem, which he will entitle Ode to Charles Fourier. "It was in the garden of the boarding house that sheltered us, my future wife and I, that I began to write the Ode," Breton indicates to his commentator, Jean Gaulmier. "It may be that it participates in the so singular atmosphere of Reno where the 'slot machines', […] line the walls, both of food stores and post offices, and which agglomerate as best they can the crowd of those who aspire to another conjugal life, cowboys and the last gold seekers."

The three movements of the poem reflect the circumstances of the journey.

On the international level, we begin to discover the reality of the Nazi extermination camps, Europe has endured a winter of unprecedented severity, days of famine drag on, the first atomic bomb blows up Hiroshima on August 5, and return "indigence, deceit, oppression, carnage". Confronted with these disasters, Fourier's socialist system remains operative.

Reversing the poetic steam, the second movement of the poem, very prosaic, points out what remains of it.

The third movement illuminates the analogy between present happiness and the future of humanity : "It is at the highest period of elective love for such a being that all the floodgates of love for humanity open wide, not certainly as it is but as one comes to want it to become actively." (OC III, 358)

From the different stages of his journey, Breton salutes the philosopher. From the great canyon of Colorado, from the petrified forest, from the Nevada of gold seekers and ghost towns, and finally, from the center of the underground and sacred chamber of the Hopi Indians, "August 22, 1945 at Mishongnovi".

The date and place inscribed in the poem have their importance. They mark Breton's interest in the destiny and culture of the Pueblo Indians. Unpublished notes, adorned with drawings, testify to this (OC III, 183-209). He notes what concerns plants, houses, customs, in particular the Cow and Snake dances, of which he briefly records the evolutions, the dancers' costumes, their jewelry, while regretting the disturbance brought by tourists. The couple is accompanied by a young ethnologist, and Breton relies on previous observations by scholars. If he happens to compare the thought of initiates to the surrealist attitude, his gaze aims to be neutral, objective.

He brings back a set of katchina dolls, but the Hopis refuse to sell him their masks. As for the Zunis, it is said that they can go so far as to kill the White man who would be found in possession of one of their masks. "I have not abandoned the idea of relating the so vivid impressions I experienced in their villages (Shungopavi, Wolpi, Zuni, Acoma) where I was able to penetrate their dignity and inalienable genius, in such deep and overwhelming contrast with the miserable condition that is made for them," he will say in his Interviews (OC III 561), while protesting against the denial of justice by Whites towards them.

However, neither this travel book, which would have required abundant reproductions, nor the work Les Grands Arts primitifs d'Amérique du Nord, conceived in 1947 for the Jeanne Bucher gallery, with the collaboration of Lévi-Strauss, Robert Lebel and Max Ernst, saw the light of day during his lifetime. They would have highlighted Breton's pioneering gaze on Amerindian societies, while satisfying a lifelong dream during this journey to New Mexico.

In short, Elisa, Fourier, the Hopi Indians participate in the same passionate attraction : the quest for individual happiness in social harmony.

II. THE ANTHOLOGY OF BLACK HUMOR

After the Ode to Charles Fourier, the individual appears explicitly in the Anthology of Black Humor, but only in the 1950 edition, with other additions.

Previously, Breton was to treat him in his 4th conference scheduled for January 25, 1946, devoted to social thinkers : Saint-Simon, Enfantin and the "immense" Fourier, of whom Breton writes : "Passions, according to Fourier, are universal and good; asceticism is wrong in denying them, and it is on passions that the future society should be established. It is precisely the restraint — we would say today the repression of passions that makes vices. These vices will disappear in a good social organization where passions will no longer be fought but encouraged and where we will have to ensure their judicious use."

He thus treats "passionate attraction or permanent social revelation […] the enthusiastic projection of [love] into all other spheres" (OC III, 357) — which amounts to placing, in full consciousness, love at the very center of all Fourierist Harmony.

The praise of passion and desire, of all desires — against Marxist discipline — will nevertheless continue to connect the heart of Fourier's message to surrealism, to the point of placing the reformer under the sign of "absolute freedom" (OC III, 265).

The speaker wonders what part of humor tinges his excesses of prophetic imagination, allied to such sure knowledge that it could be linked to the hermetic tradition.

If Fourier reveals himself as "immense" in Breton's eyes, it is because he "operates the cardinal junction between the concerns that have never ceased to animate poetry and art since the beginning of the 19th century and the plans for social reorganization that risk remaining larval if they persist in not taking them into account" (OC III, 598). Particularly sensitive to this position — analogous to that which surrealism will have wanted to embody throughout the 20th century — the poet will henceforth strive to situate the utopian at the heart of this romanticism of which he himself said he was the "suzerain" (OC III, 264). Comparing him to Nerval or scrutinizing the influence he may have had on Eliphas Lévi then Victor Hugo (OC III, 267; OC II, 910), he does not hesitate, to "render him the honors to which he is entitled," to oppose Baudelaire's judgment (OC II, 911). Finally, in these years concerned with exploring the hermetic heritage, and as if to better situate him at the confluence of all the sources of surrealism, he will not fail to question his relationships with what he calls here "hermetic philosophy" (OC II, 910), elsewhere "the persistent vitality of an esoteric conception of the world" (OC III, 740).

Fourier intended to "remake human understanding" (OC II, 910). In the years 1946-1947, the formula is widely taken up by Breton (OC III, 749, 759), to the point of becoming one of the most decisive watchwords of surrealism and rubbing shoulders with the famous banners, "change life" (Rimbaud), "transform the world" (Marx), under which the movement will have placed itself (OC III, 737).

Beyond the forms that the Fourierist doctrine may have taken, it is finally this audacity, this "absolute doubt towards traditional modes of knowledge and action" (OC III, 598) that will also make the most decisive heritage of the reformer.

These considerations, and above all the concern to integrate Fourier into an anthology of freedom to which he had long thought, lead Breton to give him a place in the Anthology of Black Humor (1950). Sensitive to Fourier's humor, criticism questions its color. For me, the question does not arise in these terms, since this collection is, in fact, a gathering of texts that Breton has enjoyed during his readings, those that have his preference, and of which he wants to keep memory. This is how he preserves and gives to read extracts from the Theory of Four Movements, the Treatise on Domestic Agricultural Association, the New Industrial and Societary World, the Last Analogies. He concludes his notice by allusively yielding the floor to Raymond Queneau : ""Perhaps a good thesis, it has been suggested, remains to be written on Fourier humorist and mystifier". It is certain that a humor of very high tension, punctuated by the sparks that the two Rousseaus (Jean-Jacques and the Douanier) would exchange, nimbuses this lighthouse, one of the most illuminating that I know, whose base defies time and whose summit clings to the clouds." (OC II, 912)

III. THE ABSOLUTE DEVIATION

Nothing surprising if, almost twenty years later, to give the keynote to the surrealist exhibition of 1965, Breton — who protested in 1961 against the idea of razing the base of Fourier's statue on the boulevard de Clichy — had made "Absolute Deviation" (OC IV, 1039) one of his method points. The Ode had already warned us : "it is the entire world that must be not only overturned but spurred on all sides in its conventions" (OC III, 359)

The method has already been exposed in 1835 by Charles Fourier, shortly before his death, and in a positive sense : "A somewhat skillful beginner succeeds in getting noticed by preaching the opposite of accepted opinions, by contradicting everything in conferences and pamphlets.

"How among so many authors and arguers who have followed this path, none has had the idea of exploiting the spirit of contradiction broadly, of applying it not to such and such a system of philosophy, but to all together; then to civilization which is their warhorse, and to the entire current social mechanism of humanity?" Charles Fourier, False Industry, fragmented, repugnant, lying and its antidote, natural industry, combined, attractive, truthful, giving quadruple product (Paris, Bossange, 1835, p. 51)

Fourier goes further in this part which he entitles "The Absolute Deviation" in reference to the vocabulary of statistics (and not of dance). Taking the example of Vasco de Gama and Christopher Columbus, he postulates that one never discovers anything if one is content to follow the paths already traveled.

To remake human understanding, one must practice a great deviation of thought. Is this not exactly the approach advocated by André Breton from the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), where we find the same example of Columbus to praise the discovery of automatic writing?

In truth, Fourier bases his reasoning on the example of Descartes, "father of modern philosophy," who recommended practicing doubt. But passive doubt leads nowhere, one must practice active doubt, by the method of absolute deviation, he writes. Is this not what Descartes previously advocated by writing "I do not want to know if there have been men before me"? Phrase placed as an epigraph to the review Dada, n° 3, in December 1918. and it is indeed to the essence of the Cartesian method that Tzara referred when he advocated absolute doubt : "A priori, that is to say with eyes closed, Dada places before action and above everything : Doubt. DADA doubts everything. Dada is tattoo. Everything is Dada. Beware of Dada".

There has therefore existed, if not in France, at least in French, a school of doubt and deviation, forming a continuous chain from Descartes to Fourier then Ducasse/Lautréamont and Tzara to end with André Breton, the latter baptizing "Absolute Deviation" the last international exhibition of surrealism that he organized in December 1965 at the Galerie de l'Œil, in Paris. The exhibitors had to follow the theory of absolute deviation advocated by Fourier, and formulated in the Theory of Four Movements.

In truth, if Breton subscribed so quickly to the theory exposed by Fourier, it is not for the fantasies he could find there, nor for the particularly liberated exercise of imagination, it is that the law of absolute deviation responds, in theoretical form, to the definition of the image that the author of Mont de piété gave himself as early as 1917 against Pierre Reverdy. While the latter advocated a distant but justified gap between the two terms of the image, his young interlocutor posed the rule of the highest arbitrariness, which he was going to take up again in the Manifesto of Surrealism. The method of absolute deviation, openly practiced and claimed, does not stop with the surrealists, since it has been taken up and theorized by the Situationists up to the Telquellians.

And the exhibition of the same name will have shown how the artists to whom the surrealists refer construct another world, very far from the one that encloses us.

APPENDIX

Occurrences of "Fourier" in digitized OC :

[III0058, A.17, III0098, A.17, III0110, A.17, III0111, A.17, III0112, A.17, III0113, A.17,

III0560; Ent., III0571, Ent., III0595, Ent., III0598, Ent., III0603, Ent., III0605, Ent., III0607, Ent., III0610, Ent., III0611, Ent., III0612, Ent., III0613, Ent., III0617, Ent., III0626, Ent., III0633, Ent.;

III0747, C.D.C., III0767, C.D.C., III0783, C.D.C., III0797, C.D.C., III0807, C.D.C., III0846, C.D.C., III0881, C.D.C., III0906, C.D.C.,

III0909, A.H.N., III0910, A.H.N., III0911, A.H.N., III0912, A.H.N.,

IV0067, A.M., IV0068, A.M., IV0274, A.M.,

IV0498, S.P., IV0589, S.P., IV0590, S.P., IV066, P.C., IV0766, S.P., IV0828, S.P.,

IV0853, P.C., IV0863, P.C., IV0882, P.C., IV0970, P.C., IV1028, P.C., IV1037, P.C., IV1041, P.C.