THE SURREALISTS AND THE ALGERIAN WAR, BY M. CARASSOU

par Michel Carassou

February 6, 2022

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Also consult Henri Béhar's article: "The Right to Disobedience. Surrealism and the Algerian War"

The Surrealists' entry into politics resulted from an awareness of the colonial fact. Their movement was officially born in October 1924 with the publication of André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism. During the summer of 1925, the war waged by France in Morocco against the Rif people of Abd El-Krim caused deep unrest in intellectual circles, and especially among the Surrealists. "Surrealist activity in the presence of this brutal, revolting, unthinkable fact will be led to question its own resources, to determine their limits; it will force us to adopt a precise attitude, external to itself, to continue to face what exceeds these limits," Breton would write in What is Surrealism?1 Taking the side of the rebels, the Surrealists drew closer to those who, in France, supported them: the communists. They signed Henri Barbusse's appeal to intellectual workers: "Yes or no, do you condemn the war?2" and this rapprochement was concretized in the manifesto The Revolution First and Always3.

From this position, anti-colonialism would become a permanent and essential motivation in the political engagements of the Surrealist group during its forty-five years of existence. In their positions, Algeria occupied a good place: in the interwar period, due to the presence in France of numerous immigrant workers of Algerian origin; after the war, due to the rise of nationalisms, then the events in Algeria, later reclassified as a war of independence.

Against the Colonial Exhibition

Until the early 1930s, the Surrealists aligned themselves with the position of the Communist Party, which applied the Comintern's directives concerning the struggle against imperialism to define an anti-colonial policy. With it, in 1930, they supported the Vietnamese who rose up at Yen Bay; the following year, they rose up against the colonial exhibition. Like the population at large, all other parties were favorable to it, even enthusiastic, including the socialists, with the notable exception of Léon Blum4. In early May, on the eve of the inauguration, the Surrealists took the initiative to distribute a tract, Don't Visit the Colonial Exhibition5: they stigmatized "colonial brigandage, forced or free labor, the complicity of the entire bourgeoisie in the birth of a swindling concept: Greater France." Claiming Lenin, who had recognized in colonial peoples the allies of the world proletariat, they demanded the "immediate evacuation of the colonies" and the indictment of "those responsible for the massacres." The journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, the group's organ, participated in the anti-colonial campaign with particularly virulent articles. Thus René Crevel attacked Marshal Lyautey, general commissioner of the Exhibition: "Hand in hand. That's nice, obscene old man. And now that you don't have Morocco, the Colonial Exhibition to draw satisfaction from desires you believe to be those of a great Roman captain, which official urinal will the 3rd Republic give you?6" At the same time, some members of the Surrealist group: Aragon, Éluard, Tanguy, Thirion, organized a counter-exhibition near the Buttes-Chaumont, The Truth about the Colonies, of which Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution published two photos7. According to the police, this event would have attracted 5,000 visitors in eight months: a derisory result, compared to the 8 million visitors to the Vincennes exhibition8, which well reflects the very minority character of this opposition to colonialism.

The Truth about the Colonies

From this period, however, the Surrealists' anti-colonialism was not reduced to an alignment with communist positions. They posed as detractors of the West and defenders of oppressed peoples. Much more than an "exotic proletarian," the colonized represented for them someone who held knowledge and powers that Western civilization had not yet totally abolished and that it was appropriate to preserve.

Moreover, from the mid-1930s, the Surrealists showed themselves more consistent than the communists in their anti-colonialist positions. The Comintern then disengaged from the terrain of anti-colonial struggles, because it saw there a risk of weakening for countries opposed to fascisms. In France, this new orientation was reflected in the distance that communists took from the Algerian nationalist movement that had been created within the immigrant worker population. The Étoile nord-africaine, an association founded in 1926 by Kabyle trade unionists, had become a powerful movement in France and Algeria. Dissolved once in 1929, it reconstituted itself under the leadership of its charismatic leader, the Tlemcenian Messali Hadj.

During the Popular Front strikes in 1936, the Étoile nord-africaine showed solidarity with French workers, but, fearing that, on the other side of the Mediterranean, it would compete with the Algerian Communist Party, composed mainly of settlers, the French Communist Party obtained from the Popular Front government of Léon Blum that it be banned. The Surrealists took up the defense of the Étoile and Messali Hadj, joining various revolutionary groups (Trotskyists, anarchists...) in an anti-colonialist gathering that foreshadowed the one that would form in the post-war years9.

With Messali Hadj

During the war, on the road to his American exile, André Breton was personally confronted with the colonial fact during a forced stopover in Martinique. Aimé Césaire made him understand the insidious colonial practices in force on the island. The Martinican poet's anti-colonial claim seemed to him "the most well-founded in the world10." Then in 1945, it was Haiti where Breton's arrival contributed to driving out the dictator Lescot11. Césaire's négritude like the indigénisme of Haitian intellectuals reinforced Breton in the idea that these descendants of Africa who opposed Western acculturation were models of resistance.

In the aftermath of the war, realizing that, under the appearance of change, in colonial policy as in other domains, reconstruction was marked by the restoration of the old order, Breton and the Surrealists naturally joined the anti-colonialist struggle that they no longer dissociated from the struggle against Stalinism. One of their first public interventions was in May 1947 a tract against the Indochina war, Liberty is a Vietnamese Word whose text was published in Le Libertaire12. The Surrealists' collaboration with anarchists would intensify in the following years.

Against the Algerian war, a tract signed by all the Surrealists and dated January 26, 1956, Alert Level13, denounced the massacre of North African populations. Breton's first public statement on this subject took place on April 20, 1956, at the Salle des Horticulteurs, during a meeting of the Committee of Action of French Intellectuals against the continuation of the war in North Africa (an organization that brought together left-wing and far-left personalities of various obediences). His intervention, "For the Defense of Liberty14," was not limited to the anti-colonial struggle but, on this theme, he extensively referenced Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. André Breton denounced the "shame" of the arrest of Claude Bourdet, director of France-Observateur, as well as that of far-left militants who had risen up against the special powers conferred on the army; he also condemned the seizure of the newspapers La Vérité and Le Libertaire, as well as the search of historian Henri-Irénée Marrou, who, in an article in Le Monde, had risen up against the use of torture.

Before this, André Breton was active within the Committee for the Liberation of Messali Hadj created in 1952 in the aftermath of the nationalist leader's deportation to France and his placement under house arrest. Messali Hadj, who founded the MNA (Algerian National Movement) in 1954, in the aftermath of the outbreak of the insurrection, was not only facing the hostility of French authorities, but also that of the FLN, the Algerian National Liberation Front, which did not shrink from violence to supplant him. While the FLN found support in France from intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Francis Jeanson, Messali Hadj was defended by the anarchist or Trotskyist far left.

After Niort, Les Sables d'Olonnes and Angoulême, Messali was sent to Belle-Île-en-mer under house arrest; a fellow traveler of the Surrealists and member of the Committee, Pierre de Massot, managed to visit him in July 1956. He recounts this meeting in "The Prisoner of the Sea" Messali Hadj at Belle-Île-en-mer article published in the journal Le Surréalisme, même15 with two photos of the Algerian leader. On either side of one of them appears this formula, "Honor to Messali Hadj," a formula that is found in an unpublished text by Breton from the same period16.

In January 1957, André Breton and Benjamin Péret were called to testify as witnesses at the Tribunal de première instance of the Seine department, in a case involving two MNA members. Refusing to address the details of the incriminated facts, Breton gave his intervention the scope of a manifesto of support that called colonialism into question: "I know of Mohammed Maroc that he is a propaganda delegate of the Algerian National Movement and that in this capacity he has always openly claimed his responsibility. Mohammed Maroc, though better placed than others to know it, is not alone in thinking that colonialism is of ignorance and lack of culture. All those who have looked in a disinterested and objective manner at the colonial fact have observed that the conditions of inequality made to the colonizer and the colonized are impoverishing, degrading for one as for the other17..."

In October 1957, after the FLN's assassination of five leaders of the USTA (Union Syndicale des Travailleurs Algériens, of Messalist obedience), a protest text "against these methods worthy of the GPU18" gathered the signatures of trade union, political and intellectual personalities, including those of two Surrealists Breton and Péret, alongside Pierre de Massot, Daniel Guérin, Pierre Lambert, Auguste Lecœur, Clara Malraux, Marceau Pivert, Laurent Schwartz... while Albert Camus expressed the same position in La Révolution prolétarienne19. The PCF and CGT had refused to condemn the murderers of the trade unionists. The Surrealists then integrated into a revolutionary and anti-colonialist left that defined itself as anti-Stalinist as much as anti-capitalist, composed of the same groups, sometimes the same people, as at the end of the 1930s.

The Manifesto of the 121

However, due to the fierce struggle between FLN and MNA, the Surrealists were prevented from proposing a vision of the colonized making a bloc in their resistance to the West. For them legitimacy was assuredly on the MNA's side due to its popular, working-class base, and its internationalist positions but, as the FLN's weight increased, they could not ignore this movement which embodied the immediate future of independent Algeria and they gave it critical support, the anti-colonial struggle then focusing on denouncing torture and the French army's violence to arrive at the slogan of disobedience. Breton was among those who defended this slogan, for example in his speech at the Gala for Aid to Conscientious Objectors, at the Mutualité, on December 5, 1958, a speech in which he spoke of the "Algerian war" – an expression still largely taboo – as a "debauchery of crimes.20"

The question of disobedience was raised again with the Manifesto of the 121 (who are the 121 first signatories of the Declaration on the Right to Disobedience in the Algerian War). An important text by the mobilization it aroused as much as by its repercussions. In the conception and diffusion of this Manifesto, the Surrealists were particularly present with, at the helm, not André Breton but Jean Schuster, the most politically active element within the group.

Except on the anti-colonial front, since the end of the war, it must be noted that politics had not occupied an important place in Surrealist activity which remained on its pre-war positions. It made a great return with General de Gaulle's arrival to power. From December 1956, a Committee of French Intellectuals brought together several Surrealists and former communist party members, like Marguerite Duras, Dionys Mascolo or Edgar Morin. In July 1958, this committee equipped itself with a bi-monthly publication, Le 14 juillet, directed by Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster21. The objective was to denounce De Gaulle's latent dictatorship who had "conquered power by surprise, thanks to an odious blackmail, and against the will of the people22." It was within the committee that the idea of the Manifesto was born. Thanks to the manuscripts preserved by Dionys Mascolo, as well as notes communicated by Jean Schuster to José Pierre23, we know the circumstances of its writing: between May and July 1960 several versions of the text were written by Schuster and Mascolo; another Surrealist, Gérard Legrand, also intervened; the final touch was given by Maurice Blanchot. A mimeographed copy circulated during the summer to collect signatures. André Breton, who had not been consulted, expressed his dissatisfaction with the principle and the formulation. He feared that this manifesto would strengthen the position of Jean-Paul Sartre and Francis Jeanson, supporters of the FLN, at the very moment when the trial of the Jeanson network of "suitcase carriers" was opening. And for him, "there could be no right to disobedience," because disobedience was a duty. Nevertheless, he ended up signing and with him most of the Surrealists, thus joining numerous personalities, intellectuals, academics, lawyers, artists... Who declared (this is the conclusion of the text):

"We respect and judge justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people."

"We respect and judge justified the conduct of French people who consider it their duty to bring aid and protection to Algerians oppressed in the name of the French people."

"The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes decisively to ruining the colonial system, is the cause of all free men."

The text was finally published on September 6, 1960 in the newspaper Vérité-Liberté24. The governmental reaction was particularly strong against the signatories, with indictments, professional bans, dismissals from public service. The journalist Robert Barrat, wrongly accused of being the instigator of the Manifesto, was incarcerated for 16 days in Fresnes prison. Among the Surrealists, the one who suffered the most was Jehan Mayoux, dismissed primary inspector, who would not regain his position until 1965. For his part, Breton suffered various legal troubles and, fearing violent actions by groups favorable to French Algeria, he left his Paris apartment for some time.

Most of the Surrealists had therefore signed. The Manifesto of the 121 was nevertheless at the origin of the last internal crisis that the André Breton movement experienced.

To defend the Surrealist point of view that they did not find in this manifesto, two close to the group, Louis Janover and Bernard Pecheur, published a text entitled "The Permanent Betrayal" in the unique issue of Sédition, a journal largely inspired by Surrealism.

The two authors criticized the FLN's position which "has succeeded, from the outside, in channeling the insurrection into an exclusively nationalist context, excluding any revolutionary claim, both social and ideological, from its program." The Manifesto of the 121, which does not address this question, therefore does not take into account a tangible revolutionary aspiration, and one can guess the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre: "While the moment seemed propitious for a reawakening of the working class on the basis of revolutionary defeatism, Sartre and his epigones [the neo-Stalinist fringe of the intelligentsia, Janover would say later] have replaced the struggle in a purely nationalist context, with its inevitable corollaries: support for FLN policy, limitation of claims to immediate peace25..." Independence therefore risked being achieved to the benefit of a faction that would impose its dictatorship on the Algerian people.

This text agitated the Surrealists enough for them to devote a dossier to it in May 1962 in La Brèche, the group's new journal26. André Breton received Louis Janover and Jean Schuster to discuss it, proof of his own hesitations. He insisted that the journal publish the entire exchanges where Janover, opposing Jehan Mayoux, discussed the Manifesto on substance and defended the idea of another path, "that of internationalism and social revolution27." In the declaration he wrote for this dossier, Breton refused to condemn the dissident ("Trotskyist28") position expressed in Sédition. Does it not fall within the continuation of the absolute rejection of colonialism that goes back to the beginnings of Surrealism and continued with the support given to Messali Hadj, the total liberation of colonial peoples representing for this movement an essential moment of human emancipation?

In the La Brèche dossier, each remained on their positions, and some of these dissidents moved a little further away from the group to soon found a new journal, Front Noir29, with the intention of returning to the first principles of Surrealism, in poetry as in politics. "The future, despite everything, will be Surrealist30," they proclaimed in a collective letter to the Surrealist group.

As for the Surrealists signatories of the Manifesto, after Breton's death and before the group's dissolution, it was towards Castro's Cuba that they would turn to find the path of revolution, or rather that of neo-Stalinism.

Thus ended historical Surrealism, far from its initial convictions. The affair was not limited to a "provincial sedition31," as José Pierre could write. The Algerian War and the Manifesto of the 121 did indeed provoke the last major upheaval within the Surrealist group, prelude to its disappearance.

February 5, 2022

1. André Breton, What is Surrealism? Brussels, René Henriquez, 1934, p. 10.

2. Declaration published in Clarté, no. 76, July 15, 1925; reproduced in José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, Paris, Losfeld, 1980, volume I, p. 52.

3. Manifesto published in La Révolution surréaliste, no. 5, October 15, 1925, p. 31; reproduced in José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, op. cit., volume I, p. 54.

4. See the Populaire page in fine.

5. Don't Visit the Colonial Exhibition [May 1931], reproduced in José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, op. cit., volume I, pp. 194-195.

6. René Crevel, "From General to Marshal," Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 3, December 1931, p. 28.

7. "At the exhibition The Truth about the Colonies 8, avenue Mathurin-Moreau," Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 4, December 1931, hors-texte.

8. Cf. Charles-Robert Ageron, "The Colonial Exhibition of 1931. Republican myth or imperial myth?," online journal Études coloniales, http://etudescoloniales.canalblog.com/archives/2006/08/25/2840733.html

9. Cf. Jacques Simon, Algerian Immigration in France. From Origins to Independence, Paris, Paris-Méditerranée, 2000; Benjamin Stora, Messali Hadj: Pioneer of Algerian Nationalism, Paris, Hachette, 2004

10. André Breton, Preface to the bilingual edition of Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first edition in Fontaine (Algiers), no. 35, 1943.

11. Cf. Catherine Marchasson, "Haiti," André Breton Dictionary, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2012, pp. 392-393; Gérald Bloncourt and Michael Löwy, Messengers of the Storm. André Breton and the January 1946 Revolution in Haiti, Pantin, Le Temps des cerises, 2007.

12. Le Libertaire, May 22, 1947. Tract reproduced in José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, op. cit., volume II, p. 27.

13. Reproduced in José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, op. cit., volume II, p. 146.

14. Reproduced in André Breton, Complete Works, Paris, Gallimard, "Pléiade," volume IV, 2008, p. 940. Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism was first published in Paris by Réclame, a publishing house linked to the French Communist Party, in June 1950.

15. Pierre de Massot, "The Prisoner of the Sea," Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, pp. 159-162.

16. André Breton's handwritten notes, dated April 9, 1956 and intended for his speech of April 20, 1956 at the Salle des Horticulteurs (cf. note 13). Reproduced on the André Breton site.

17. Manuscript of responses to four typewritten questions at the time of Mohamed Maroc's trial on January 24, 1957. Reproduced on the André Breton site, https://cms.andrebreton.fr/fr/person/14507

18. "Appeal to Opinion," La Vérité (newspaper of the Internationalist Communist Party, Trotskyist Lambertist tendency), no. 473, October 17, 1957, p. 1.

19. Albert Camus, "Post Scriptum," La Révolution prolétarienne, November 1957; reprinted in Le Libertaire, December 1957 under the title "Albert Camus's Appeal."

20. André Breton, "Address at the 'Gala for Aid to Conscientious Objectors', Mutualité, December 5, 1958," Complete Works, Paris, Gallimard, "Pléiade," volume IV, 2008, p. 974.

21. Le 14 juillet, nos 1 to 3, July 14, 1958 to June 18, 1959 (reprinted in one volume, Paris, Séguier, 1990).

22. Le 14 juillet, no. 1, July 14, 1958, p. 1.

23. Dionys Mascolo Collection, IMEC; José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, op. cit., volume II, p. 392.

24. Underground newspaper created in 1960 by Robert Barrat, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Paul Thibaud and Jacques Panijel to disseminate information forbidden or censored on the Algerian war.

25. Louis Janover and Bernard Pecheur "The Permanent Betrayal" Sédition, no. 1, dated June 1961 but published in October 1961.

26. "The declaration of the 121, 'Sédition' and the Surrealists," La Brèche, surrealist action, no. 2, May 1962, pp. 61-72.

27. Ibid., p. 68.

28. Ibid., p. 62.

29. Front noir, nos 1 to 7-8, June 1963 to February 1965. Partial reprint in Front noir 1963-1967 Surrealism and Council Socialism, texts chosen and presented by Louis Janover and Maxime Morel, Paris, Non Lieu, 2019.

30. "Open Letter to the Surrealist Group," Front noir, no. 1, June 1963, pp. 3-4.

31. José Pierre, Surrealist Tracts and Collective Declarations, op. cit., volume II, p. 396.