FROM FRONT NOIR TO FRONT NOIR

par

November 13, 2021

From Front Noir to Front Noir. I give this title to my intervention to clearly show that all the questions that Front Noir posed at its birth are still ours today. This is also the reason why the guiding thread of this reflection can only be a return to the past. This past tells everything about the ideas I still defend today and the cause for which they are always set aside. I think that our time is characterized by a form of generalized amnesia. What was called Stalinism no longer has its place in history. Everything is done to no longer know anything about the importance of those who showed at their own risk and peril that the USSR was the negation of the ideas defended in the Communist Manifesto. Nor is anything said about the dramatic consequences of this occultation on our hopes and our culture. In a completely different domain, one can experience a certain unease when speaking of surrealism and wondering what became of the absolute non-conformism mentioned in the founding Manifesto, of the absolute revolt and total insubmission of the Second Manifesto. So many polemics and excommunications to end up there, that is to say in fact at the place where surrealism refused to imagine that it would have to arrive. The "clichés" that André Breton then feared have invaded everything, and whether they are good or bad it amounts to the same thing.

In a second phase, I want to emphasize the fact that Front Noir has no original avant-garde position. I can even say that it is this absence of originality that makes its originality. There is in Front Noir no will to surpass surrealism in time and no more the idea of a theory on which the classification of poetic works would depend. I wanted to return to the radicality of the Surrealist Revolution to show that it was in concordance with the political radicality of council socialism. This is what first differentiates my approach from all the avant-garde spirit. Each avant-garde wants to find not something new, but the new, its new, and it can thus claim in history a place that it denies others to occupy. The last ism is always in competition with the previous ism and it is this sign that is engraved on the pedestal of all avant-gardes to leave their mark in history. We never had a thought of this kind.

I engaged in the two directions that oriented my thought. On one side poetry, poetry as Benjamin Fondane feels it when he speaks of an affirmation of reality in the literal sense of the term, of the obscure certainty that existence has an axis, a sensitive respondent. On the other side, it is the revolutionary utopia, an emancipation movement that responds precisely to this poetic sensitivity through the social critique that utopia carries within it. For me, surrealism was utopia as artistic practice. Each had to find with it their power of creation. And I joined in this way council socialism which was the utopia of workers' praxis, the manifestation of the impersonal ethics of the workers' movement which is destined to restore to each their social power.

André Breton was the first of these people who marked my thought. I later met Le Maréchal, Gaëtan Langlais, Miguel Abensour, Go Van Xuyet and Maximilien Rubel. None of them belonged to any avant-garde and that is why it was possible to establish a particular link between the two tendencies they represented, and to unite their thought for a collaboration that respected each one's independence. Front Noir will be the attempt to find a collective expression of this spirit. The journal will take its political and poetic marks in opposition to those of the avant-gardes which are all marked by a will to surpass. We, we wanted to surpass nothing, we were simply seeking the just position that would allow the two critiques to associate to form a whole. This is why saying one was an artist had nothing reductive for us. And it is at the same time that we discovered the Marxian utopia that Maximilien Rubel and the friends of Council Socialism defended, with Paul Mattick and other Marxists.

Two readings guided me on this path and I find them in a certain way in all my reflections. The first is the radical rupture that Antonin Artaud introduces in the expression of revolt with the youthful poems of Tric Trac du ciel and L'Ombilic des limbes. In a rather paradoxical way, the second significant reading was that of André Breton's book, Political Position of Surrealism. It was just as important to me as the 1924 Manifesto, because it is there that he exposes the definitive rupture of surrealism with the CP, a rupture that he does not relate only to politics but to the relationship Poetry and Revolution. This is the reason why he takes up the formula: Change life said Rimbaud, transform the world said Marx. These two watchwords for us make only one. All my reflection will be centered on the interpretation of this relationship, because the mere fact of enunciating them independently shows that it is at this point that there is a problem. The expression is found in Crevel's last text in a slightly different form. It is more brilliant in Breton, but it closes the problem on itself, while Crevel makes all the difficulty appear. Here is what Crevel says: "'Change life', such was, as Guéhenno recently recalled, the very objective cry of the most subjective of poets. These three words of Rimbaud, which found their full meaning in his attitude during the Commune, place him among the revolutionaries thinking, as Marx says, no longer of analyzing the world in the manner of philosophers, but of transforming it." If one reflects on it, Crevel means that transforming the world contains within it changing life and that it is in this sense that the revolution operates, because transforming the world can have several meanings that depend on the revolutionary theory to which one appeals.

I have always placed myself between the two watchwords, change life and transform the world, but it is precisely the way of thinking this relationship that has been the object of my questioning. What is changing life and what is transforming the world? These are indeed watchwords. It is those who carry them who give them their content.

When I pushed Breton's door in 1954 I was not asking myself the question of knowing at what point and how the two neuralgic points of the Surrealist Revolution came together, nor about what is contained in one and the other of the two exigencies. But it is precisely when the two watchwords make only one that the question arises of knowing what this One is made of. Changing life can bring us back to the figures of modern alienation, to what is called the societal revolution which is carried by avant-garde thought and applies to the world of art and culture. On the other side, transforming the world can refer to the metamorphoses of capital, as we saw in the USSR the Marxist theory was adapted to a stage of primitive accumulation baptized construction of socialism in a single country.

We must therefore know how and why they are used separately from each other, and not take one for the other, and confuse subversion, transgression within the limits of the everyday of so-called bourgeois morality, with revolution, the struggle for the overthrow of relations of production and domination. When Marx calls for the positive abolition of private property and the sensitive appropriation of objective man, of human works, he puts the dots on the i's. He declares that this must not be understood especially in the sole sense of immediate, partial enjoyment, in the sense of possession, of having. Now, it is indeed in this way that changing life is interpreted in the domain of culture and not in the sense that revolution can give it, that is to say a creative tension of new values of emancipation. Art is in the image of changing life and the world has been transformed but without the fundamental social relationship moving an inch, on the contrary.

It is at this point that Front Noir's critique intervenes and it is in the heat of this questioning about the avant-gardes that a decisive meeting took place for me at the beginning of the 60s, that of a movement centered around a mimeographed journal, the Cahiers de discussion pour le socialisme de conseils. The radical rupture with party socialism was accompanied by the recognition of the abyss that had opened up between Marx's thought and the interpretations and detournements it had to undergo with Marxisms. It was for the time a veritable intellectual revolution to associate Marx's social critique with a thought of anarchy, to show how the critique of economic alienation fused with that of concrete existence and that the surpassing in both spheres could only be done by a social revolution whose utopia had opened the way.

In fact, I entered surrealism as if it were the pre-war group that was still in becoming when it had become the post-war group. The reissue of Front Noir made this history resurface, and it modified my perception of this past. But in the reality of the group's concerns as I experienced it, there was no other perspective for surrealism than the recognition of its artistic capital, but it expressed it with the language it had forged during its struggles. Hence the painful uncertainty when it was necessary to confront the gap between words and reality, between the beginnings and this arrival.

Everything that for Front Noir was alive and object of struggle and disputes is found today in this past and everything I can say about surrealism proceeds from a retrospective look. What place did surrealism want to occupy in history? What place could it carve out there? What place does it occupy there? It is this central question that surrealism then forced us to pose given that it had itself begun by posing the problem to other movements. It is the answer to this question that caught up with it in history.

All the quarrels and polemics have fallen into oblivion. But one cannot forget the injunction that Daumal addresses to Breton while surrealism was lecturing the groups that represented another poetic movement by enjoining them to submit to the same references. "Take care, André Breton of figuring later in literary history manuals, whereas if we were seeking some honor it would be to be inscribed for posterity in the history of cataclysms." But what is most important in this reminder is to understand that this end was already present in the path the group was taking, because the surrealism that was constructing this history was fatally bound to open a page in these history books.

Today we know where it is and why it got there and we apply to it the criteria of judgment it applied to others. There is nothing more to dispute about it, everything is inscribed and supports no erasure while the Surrealist Revolution remains in history as an immense claim that has remained without response.

When one now puts Front Noir back into circulation, what was then in front finds itself behind. Plunging back into this anonymous work makes the abyss that has opened up between the Surrealist Revolution and what I call really existing surrealism resurface. There is no longer any need to confront what was at the time an orientation still uncertain, but one must understand why surrealism itself got there. What surrealism has become, can it be considered as a failure or as a victory? And in relation to what and to whom? To answer the question is to return to the origin of this history and to ask oneself if other paths were not possible. One will discuss for example the place that must be accorded to the painter Le Maréchal who collaborated with Front Noir. He was recognized by a milieu whose codes of recognition he refused and he never renounced either his refusal or his quality as painter-poet. And it is this double belonging that makes his refusal engraved in his work. And this refusal is still part of what Front Noir brings us.

We moved away from surrealism without however following the situationists while they were in a sense closer to us in certain of their political positions. But the form of withdrawal that we intended to defend was in our eyes irreconcilable with the ambitions of the avant-garde and the forms of expression and appropriation of what it found before it.

It is at this point that we found the critique of what we called with Jean-Pierre Garnier the second right, in other words the representatives of the new petty-bourgeoisie intellectual. One of its tasks was to rid culture of old things and to move forward by bringing the critical elements it needs to give direction to the transformations in progress. It is the avant-garde that assumes this function. The manifestos change nothing in the logic of these movements. As each avant-garde claims to bring what was lacking to the other, one arrives at a chronological ordering of the work of art and critical thought. The name of the avant-garde in question becomes a value mark of the product and the history of the group a private property of the authors.

From this point of view, the history of the avant-garde is always double-faced. Thanks to this form of opposition it can put itself forward and exercise its influence on the social milieus that are sensitive to this form of critique. It seizes ideas still diffuse in opposition milieus to make them the body of a theory that relates to what it intends to surpass. Subversion is the generating spirit of these values destined to make revolt enter into the new forms of artistic representation. The elements of non-conformist culture are integrated into a movement of demands that never calls into question the dominant social relationships.

For surrealism, the symbol of a destructive consecration of the aspiration of origins will have been the André Breton exhibition which by its title alone redefined the retreat of the Surrealist Revolution toward the forms of this new appropriation: Beauty will be convulsive. Subversion thus took precedence over revolution. I had then diverted the surrealist tract "Permettez!" which called as a deliverance the destruction of the statue erected in Charleville in honor of Rimbaud! From this point of view, the same words apply perfectly to Breton's consecration by the Centre Pompidou, since it is the original principles of surrealism that have been crushed by this monument.

The paradoxical character of surrealism is that the same facts of the movement's history push us either to admiration or to critique. Either one judges according to the principles of rupture that the Surrealist Revolution had formulated from its origin, and then surrealism's entry into the universe of art appears as the caricature of what had been foreseen at the start. Or one places oneself from the point of view of this aesthetic renewal that the transformations of society call for, and here is surrealism object of admiration. The renunciations that allowed it to make its voice heard are part of what is considered as its successes. Today where the life of the movement is no longer at stake, we take into consideration the two points of view but by making sure not to mix the two tendencies to justify one or the other. I try to understand how absolute non-conformism gradually adapted to a certain conformism. But in the historical narrative, everything is always presented as if continuity had respected the intransigence of origins, absolute revolt and total insubmission.

It is through poetry that the junction between the sometimes contradictory terms of the movement was naturally operated. Surrealism appealed in this domain to the unconscious and automatism. It thus opened a dike, and the liberated flood renewed the sensitive climate, but it covered everything with a repetitive imagery without surprise in the expectation it created. And it is this that dried up the sources of poetic inspiration and made Benjamin Fondane say that the surrealists were only poets when they were not surrealists. And when they are poets, they inscribe themselves in a genealogy that ignores the injunctions and programs of the avant-garde. Here again surrealism put into practice procedures that led to a quite different place than the one it thought it was reaching. Poetry found itself as if locked up in the rational exploitation of the irrational.

Poetry is precisely the expression of a unitary idea of inner life. Surrealism obeys a theoretical injunction and it is by their distance from the surrealist group that le Grand Jeu and Artaud appear in Front Noir as the truth of the Surrealist Revolution. It is integrated into an expression of revolt that is not defined by adherence to a theory, nor to the practices of an avant-garde and its judgments. It is at this point that the revolutionary aspiration touches its point of equilibrium. Similarly when it is said that surrealism is the unconscious within reach, and that with it "the treasures of the invisible unconscious become palpable lead the language directly, in one go."

When Daumal places poetic creation in a position of absolute gap with respect to literary recognition, he makes of this inner creation a veritable mysticism of writing. This consciousness conforms to a social refusal without it being necessary to relate it to a political commitment to see in it the expression of a radical opposition. On the contrary, it is the incommensurable dimension of inner research that gives the strength to resist integration. The refusal to succeed is the very spirit of changing life, while succeeding through refusal is only the way of appropriating revolt for purposes of recognition.

It is on the basis of this refusal that a community of friends can aggregate who link changing life to transforming the world without calling for an avant-garde program. This is what we will call after Pierre Naville a "society of refractories." It makes of failure as subjective value of man, "a privileged form of 'resistance' to the objective and triumphant course of things, and in some way the refusal of oppressed subjectivity." We find this same spirit at the origin of all contestation movements that explode the defined frameworks before even a collective revolt comes to light.

It is at this point that Front Noir joins a conception of revolution in perfect resonance with our positions on poetry. Council socialism was rooted in the refusal of the cult of personalities, in what we called with Maximilien Rubel the anonymous spirit of the emancipation movement. This idea is found in Marx when he declares in 1881 that "in party programs one must avoid everything that lets one guess a direct dependence vis-à-vis such and such an author or such and such a book."

It is through its rupture with the CP that surrealism can establish itself more freely in a milieu where it finds its true relationship to the spirit of revolt. It moves away from Marxism and the imperatives imposed by the Party, and the question now arises of knowing to what idea of transforming the world the changing life of poetry now relates. Surrealism joins the history of art. At this point the surrealist revolution turns toward cultural subversion and one begins to glimpse what will be the history of really existing surrealism. But it is after the war that new arrivals will redefine the terms of the relationship of art with the spirit of the movement itself.

It is the enigma that surrealism endeavored to pierce, while neither Artaud nor Daumal nor Roger Gilbert-Lecomte can confront it, because they think that their works are revolutionary without their needing any other proof than its very expression. Transform the world and change life change meaning.

"That each man want to consider nothing beyond his deep sensitivity, his intimate self, that is for me the point of view of integral Revolution." Of integral surrealist revolution, Artaud could have said! One feels vibrating the same mystical intensity in the letter that a Russian revolutionary writes to his friend Trotsky on the eve of his suicide. "For more than thirty years I have admitted the idea that human life has meaning only as long and to the extent that it is at the service of something infinite. For us humanity is this infinite. Everything else is finite, and working for the rest has no meaning."

In Crevel, as in Roger Gilbert-Lecomte or Fondane, social critique is rooted in a revolt that becomes a questioning of the human condition. The same aspiration underlies René Crevel's approach. In "The New Redemption", he speaks of "a certain sensation of grandeur which alone seems proper to give us sometimes the pride of living." Roger Gilbert-Lecomte enunciates the same prescription without possible turning back: "I will never recognize the right to write or paint except to seers. That is to say to men perfectly and consciously desperate who have received the watchword 'Revelation-Revolution', men who do not accept, standing against everything, and who, when they seek the way out, know pertinently that they will not find it within the limits of the human. Those will always recognize that they are of ours."

"Poetry: Means of knowledge", says Crevel, which resonates with Gilbert-Lecomte's remark in Retour à tout: "Morality like Poetry is a necessary mode of knowledge (of self-knowledge as well as that of the world)." "Political evolution: communism. Role of intellectuals." At the two poles of poetic thought Gilbert-Lecomte and Crevel meet in the recognition of the place that poetry occupies in their work. As for Joffé, the dimension of the infinite is the measure of their struggle. It defines in their eyes the revolutionary spirit, whether in the domain of social critique or in that of poetic thought. And for some as for others everything else is only literature.

One can speak with good reason of a reversal of all values. The entire vision of the world of art and literature is found overturned. "Let us open our eyes, Benjamin Fondane tells us in the False Treatise on Aesthetics: poetry is a need, and not a pleasure, an act and not a relaxation; the poet affirms, poetry is an affirmation of reality. When we listen to a work of art, we do not contemplate, nor do we enjoy, we straighten a twisted balance, we affirm what throughout the day we have shamefully denied: the full reality of our acts, of our hope, of our freedom, the obscure certainty that existence has a meaning, an axis, a respondent." Poetry is this "brilliant particle of being", "the dose of affirmation that humanity needs to live", and we are thus before "the possibility of poetry as truth."

What to say in these conditions of the knowledge and recognition of surrealism by the artistic and literary milieu? It takes place exactly in the space that the modernization of culture was opening to it, when the great post-war sweep puts an end to the persistence of prohibitions and makes the locks of the old regime jump. Surrealism is at the rendezvous of modernity, it poses itself as avant-garde, in relation to the transformations at work in society where already other voices are making themselves heard.

Front Noir turned toward the past to understand the reasons that led the surrealist movement to this role that made it the reference point in the artistic and literary domain, with what that implied despite denials. We wanted to know where the cleavage that opened and deepened between the absolute non-conformism of the Surrealist Revolution and really existing surrealism that gives pride of place to artistic things was located. From this point of view the journal has not aged. We hoped to open a path between surrealism and the Situationist International and we thought naively that Front Noir could be this avant-garde of the future, that is to say a circle of friends and not rivals in soul ready to exclude the ill-thinking to mark a territory with their imprint. That is why we do not conceal either the errors or the contradictory elements of our reflection, because it was not simple to find the lost path of surrealism and that of social utopia and to see how one was lost in the other to arrive at the same point.

It is the same path that led us to the highlighting by Maximilien Rubel of the detournement of Marx's work by Marxisms. The spirit that linked Front Noir to Council Socialism found its expression in a journal with a disconcerting title, the Etudes de marxologie. This journal with academic appearances would deserve that one make its history, because it represents a crucial moment of revolutionary thought. Beyond all the interpretations that were marked by belonging to Marxist chapels, it opens onto a thought that in a certain way anticipates the disappearance of the USSR and its fallout in all countries.

On one side the journal was led to make Marx intervene as critic of Marxisms and of the regimes of State capitalism that claimed his work and it endeavored to bring back to light workers' utopia and the history of council socialism. On the other side, and in the same impulse, we developed a critique of the new ideologies in formation and a deep analysis of the subversive demands of the avant-garde which are only one facet of what is called today the societal revolution. A text dated 1978, and entitled "Surrealism, Art and Politics", endeavors to disentangle in the avant-garde movements the elements of this subversion and to separate them from a thought of emancipation born of workers' struggles. A brochure with a revealing title, Poetry and Revolution, which dates from 1967 testifies to this will to keep the two elements united. One sees there that Breton is always in balance between the two and that is the reason why he has remained close to us, despite sometimes cruel divergences.

From this point of view everything knots and unknots in the relationship that is established at the 1935 Writers' Congress marked by the questions of Breton, Crevel and Fondane. The relationship of surrealism to the political was then inscribed in the genealogy of a revolt carried by poetry and by the revolutionary values that certain milieus of culture claimed. Everything was knotted at this point, but it is after the war that the new contestatory intellectual petty-bourgeoisie will end up making the orthopedic corset of morality and representation that prevented the milieus of art from breathing freely crack. The subversion of values will have reason over the transformation of the world whose Marxist-Leninist movement had defined the method and content. One speaks of the writer before the revolution, but the problem is to know what revolution it is about and what becomes of the writer. It is from the ethical point of view that Breton will question himself in the fifties on the revolutionary destiny of the movement. He is conscious of the displacement of the new line of rupture between surrealism on the way to recognition and the artistic world that claims it. It is here also that the words of Front Noir or of the Etudes de marxologie still preserve a certain resonance.

Each period has its demands that displace the central point of contestation. We now arrive at a moment where the struggle for feminism and ecology has become the center of reflection of the new intellectual petty-bourgeoisie. If woman is the future of man, what man is it about and in what society? It is Joseph Déjacque, the creator of the Libertaire, who will take sides for the emancipation of women against Proudhon's conservatism, and it is in the Etudes de marxologie that this text will be brought back to light in 1972 by a friend who has just died, Valentin Pelosse.

Ecology has undergone the same fate. While it could not be conceived without the overthrow of working methods and relations of production and exchange, it remains locked in a circle that capitalism keeps under control. The remedies administered are not intended to overcome the evil by eradicating it, but to protect it by remedying its weaknesses.

History has taken surrealism in the same net. Under these conditions, claiming today surrealism as it is presented to us means nothing more than putting forward an artistic school and placing it in the genealogy of surpassed avant-gardes. The movement has become the reservoir from which those who seek a path toward recognition and who want to be heard by those they criticize elsewhere draw. Surrealism, each writes your name, but what does it mean at the present time? The eye exists in surrealist state, but to look at what? Nothing but what is now inscribed in ordinary historiography, which makes artistic surrealism have all its past before it and it weighs heavily in the balance of gallery commerce.

This new situation seems less dramatic than the one that writers had to face before the revolution, when Souvarine spoke of the Nightmare in the USSR. The worst seems behind us, it's true, but it's much more difficult to find the right tone to speak about it. In 1950, in an open letter to Paul Eluard who had then passed into the ranks of Stalinism Breton asked him to intervene to save Zavis Kalandra one of their friends who was caught in a Moscow trial organized in Prague. Breton was not referring to theory, but to an ethical judgment. For him, the inflection of the voice carried the sign of truth and falsehood, of true and false. It is therefore to poetry that he appealed. It is to poetry that one must appeal today to ensure that the unheard sound of the surrealist revolution still pierces the jumble of specialized language put into practice to cover surrealism.

It is at this point that I stop and that all those I have known have stopped. I myself remained a prisoner of this contradiction but the important thing is to know how to admit it. I speak of it in the letter where I announce to Jean Schuster who was then my great friend my departure from the surrealist group. He responds to it with intelligence, but without convincing me. He is the representative of an idea of revolution that does not clearly distinguish itself from the radical face of Trotskyism and he will even slide to a certain complacency toward Castro, dragging the group with him. It is surrealism's last step before the curtain falls.

When one refers today to the USSR and the movement that was born of the October revolution it is always a question of communism while the emancipatory thought that defended communism has been destroyed by the parties that covered themselves with this name and that this begins as early as October. And it is no longer a question of speaking of the historical responsibility of these intellectual milieus who saw in the terror put into practice by Stalin and the Bolshevik party an application of Marx's theories and communism. Nothing remains of the discussions in collective memory. Amnesia is an organized form of ideology to close this history on the equal sign between communism and State capitalism.

In a completely different domain history has made disappear from collective memory everything that in the Surrealist Revolution worried in advance about a possible consecration of surrealism. Once surrealism reduced to the most important artistic and literary movement of the 20th century there remains of this history only a certain idea of the new and of cultural rupture that imposes itself through this vision of the avant-garde.

I do not want to end without saying a word about a critique that one is right to address to me. Friends have rightly pointed out to me that my presence here could be perceived as a negation of the position of withdrawal that I have always defended. The critique seems founded to me, I share it in a sense, and I nevertheless accepted it thinking of what I emphasized from the beginning of my intervention. Front Noir is like a ray of light that underlines what remains important in the Surrealist Revolution and other movements.

We are survivors because we have lived something else and that is the reason why the reissue of Front Noir occupies this place. The journal is a witness to this permanence. It wanted to bring nothing original but to show how council socialism and Marx's thought as critique of Marxism articulated on a reflection on surrealism and the destiny of avant-gardes.

The first issue of Front Noir opens with a quote from Roger Gilbert-Lecomte to clearly mark our sensitive orientation. I have made heard subsequently the voices of Fondane, Crevel, Artaud, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Breton to make them resonate and show their points of concordance that do not necessarily appear elsewhere. One could say that they link up and that if one put them together they could make us hear a Counter-Congress of Writers, the one where the "vanquished" of whom Panaït Istrati speaks would not have been forbidden the platform and where poetry would have a voice in the chapter. One would see what it is about Aragon who has today become untouchable, as if his political positions were considered as without influence on his literary work. It is in 1927 that Fondane wrote a text where he speaks of Aragon as an "adroit condottiere, a 'fierce inquisitor'." He did not need to wait for Aragon to join the CP since all his writings are impregnated with the same spirit.

I have already cited Crevel's phrase that puts the final point to the speech he did not deliver at the 1935 Writers' Congress. He evokes there the "saraband of old fierce ghosts, where everything is only clotted blood, cold sweat, shrouds and tinkling chains. To the revenants oppose the devenants." The ghosts of whom Crevel speaks today bear on their shrouds the bloody mark of Stalinism and they endeavor to banalize its horrors by comparing them to the horrors of capitalism, while they are only a variant of it. The devenants will only come back to life if they find what we call the lost words of communism and the lost words of the surrealist revolution.

Fondane wrote to Jean Wahl about Kierkegaard that "Problems of passion can only be discussed passionately." I will say to finish that it is necessary to repassion the problems as far as surrealism, communism and all the other "isms" that lent life to a collective thought are concerned. This amounts to hoping that the avant-garde to come will be in the image of this group of whom Heine speaks about Schelling in De l'Allemagne: "...a school in the manner of the ancient poets, a poetic school where no one is subject to any doctrine, to any determined discipline, but where each obeys the spirit and reveals it in his manner." One can say that le Grand Jeu and Front Noir had no other ambition.

A phrase of Le Maréchal dating from 1984 helps us to understand the spirit that was that of Front Noir. "No novelties here, no invention, only an individual tear in the common fund." One must simply know that there were several tears to make this common fund.

* The Lost Words of the Revolution

followed by an Interview with Nicolas Norrito

(To be published, December 2022, Editions du Sandre).

La Révolution surréaliste (1988), Klincksieck, 2016.