The growing rivalry between André Breton and Salvador Dalí during the 1930s is often explained by the Catalan's "Hitlerism". In reality, Dalí can be considered as a "rebel" of surrealism who works within the very group led by Breton, due to his specific conception of surrealism, as well as the progressive hardening of his views and practices. Within the framework of this article, we will emphasize the fundamentally different nature of the surrealism elaborated by Dalí and, at the same time, his desire to be recognized by Breton in 1930; we will then highlight how Dalí manifests and radicalizes this difference throughout the 1930s, both on the theoretical level and on the level of his creations. We will be particularly interested in the "myths" constructed by the Catalan around William Tell, Millet's Angelus and Hitler. These productions are increasingly less accepted by Breton but they all stem from a common reflection with Crevel, the surrealist most engaged in political action and closest to communism, which allows us to nuance and rethink Dalí's supposed "Hitlerism".

A Fundamentally Different Surrealism

Between 1927 and 1929, Dalí developed an approach gradually integrating Breton's views, moving from a machinist "anti-art" to a surrealist "anti-art". In particular, he advocates the adoption of a documentary gaze, on the model of the man of science who observes an object under a microscope and discovers it completely different. Within the framework of machinism, this innovative seeing is possible thanks to the automatism of the eye considered as a machine. Within the framework of surrealism, the gaze is on the other hand nourished by psychic automatism: the object becomes enigmatic and becomes the index of subconscious thought. This aesthetics leads Dalí to stage, on the visual or descriptive level, objects that deform, liquefy, fragment becoming unrecognizable and participating at the same time in the inner world and the outer world. In Four Fishermen's Women at Cadaqués/Sun (1928), the bodies are so disoriented and deformed that they evoke fingers, genitals, eyes, faces, breasts, etc.

In the impossibility of going further in the enterprise of fragmentation of objects, Dalí is led to elaborate the "paranoiac-critical" activity from 1929-1930. He no longer draws inspiration from the documentary vision of the scientist, but from the interpretative vision of the paranoiac: as redefined by Dalí, the paranoiac manages to see what he desires at the subconscious level and this by automatically projecting the obsessive idea into the contours or structures of real objects. Thus, the same form can refer to totally different objects as in the multiple image Paranoiac Face (1935), which can refer to an African landscape, a Picasso-like face (according to Dalí) or Sade's face (according to Breton). This vision is at once subjective, because linked to a personal fantasy (the "paranoiac" aspect), and objective, because verifiable in the forms of objects (the "critical" aspect).

In 1929, Breton is fascinated by Dalinian images but he is also wary of the scatological elements that figure, for example, in The Lugubrious Game (1929) and which belong to the material baseness advocated by Bataille. In the preface to the catalogue of Dalí's first exhibition in Paris in 1929, he thus exhorts the Catalan to discover Cimmeria, this mythical and archaic region where desire and wonder dominate against reason and low materialism. In search of a place within the surrealist movement following his violent break with his Catalan collaborators, Dalí then borrows the path designated by Breton: in the volume The Visible Woman (1930), he indicates that the low elements are only double images hiding and revealing the "desired land of treasures" according to an alchemical transmutation. Thus, the "rotten donkey", title of the first text of the work, hides and reveals the precious stone, the two being analogous by their brilliant character. Through the sublimation of all low elements, Dalí also takes up the alchemical imaginary that Breton mobilizes in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) to defend the cognitive and noble value of the surrealist enterprise as well as to denounce the practice of these philosopher-excrements such as Bataille, founded on an alterity not transposable to another level. This common reflection around the alchemical imaginary is moreover manifested in the frontispiece conceived by Dalí for the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. The Catalan places side by side two formally analogous objects but of opposite meaning: an "excrement" and a "diamond", a figure of the philosopher's stone.

We then understand Breton's enthusiastic reception. In the insert for this work, with Eluard, he emphasizes the cognitive scope of the paranoiac-critical activity and this "without useless baseness", the baseness of Dalí's images being henceforth seen as a "passing organic state". He also places this mode of creation under the sign of "dialectical thought" which is adopted by the surrealists in 1930 and which postulates the opposition and unity of opposites: the possibility of joining "paranoia" and "criticism" fits precisely into this type of approach.

If Dalí endows surrealism with an instrument that produces irrational and shareable knowledge, he also proposes an approach that is fundamentally different from Breton's. The finality of surrealism is the same and is linked to this "crisis of consciousness" that must be provoked on the moral level. However, the means employed – that is to say psychic automatism – is understood differently: Dalí radicalizes Breton's views to the point of reversing them. For the Catalan, subliminal thought is not passive and only perceptible by inner senses (hearing), but it becomes active and visible in the outer world by investing the forms of objects. Moreover, it does not materialize only in the form of traces but it gives itself to be seen through formal analogies. The surrealist image is also conceived differently: it is no longer this movement of bringing together two distant realities giving rise to a "spark" as in Breton, but it is founded on a movement of dissociation of two or several condensed contents, following an instant overdetermination of the outer world by the inner world.

In 1930, Dalí does not emphasize these conceptual differences, but he rather insists on inscribing his project in the lineage of Breton's. Over the years, however, his positions harden and, in the Conquest of the Irrational of 1935, he explicitly claims the superiority of his activities in the face of the "serious inconveniences" linked to passive automatism.

As for Breton, at the moment when it becomes urgent to redefine the articulation between outer and inner worlds, he finds in Dalí a way to rethink his own surrealism: he reaffirms the idea of "pure psychic automatism", integrating into it an objective and interpretative dimension. This theoretical renewal is striking if we consider Breton's conception of the visual arts. In Surrealism and Painting (1928), no value is accorded to what, traditionally, characterizes the pictorial image, notably its link to the outer world and its visual dimension: subordinated to writing, surrealist art is conceived as the imitation of a "purely interior model" of auditory type and as a trace of a psychic reality. Following Dalí's contribution, Breton's position evolves. Commenting in 1936 on Oscar Dominguez's method in "On a Decalcomania Without Preconceived Object (Decalcomania of Desire)", Breton indeed proposes a formula to "incorporate into the 'Secrets of Surrealist Magic Art'", a counterpart to the "secret" of automatic writing that takes into account the visual arts with their own characteristics. Two successive creative phases are described: that of the fabrication, by mechanical gestures, of the image outside of any conscious intentionality, which allows the subconscious to express itself in its purity, and that of the conscious interpretation of the forms that appeared on the sheet.

This recipe provides, as in Dalí, the interpretative shaping of the object as well as the mobilization of visual perception and external reality. However, for Breton, the interpretation of perceived forms is not the means of expression of the subconscious: it does not intervene suddenly and automatically but a posteriori, during a second stage, and it operates in full consciousness. What prevails is the first stage referring to a "state of grace" that allows contact with subliminal thought in its pure state.

Finally, not granting a driving role to the interpretative process, Breton will always remain faithful to the idea of a psychic automatism that expresses itself passively and in a pure state (outside of any "shaping" gesture). Thus, when the leader of the surrealist group integrates the imaginary of the "paranoiac-critical" activity, he diverts it in an important way. This reappropriation is fruitful: it allows Breton to reorient and re-legitimize his views; it allows Dalí to be recognized within the surrealist group and to pursue his explorations.

"Specters" and "Phantoms": An Increasingly Interventionist Subconscious Thought

The fundamental difference that separates the two imaginaries will not be long in manifesting itself: from 1933-1934, Dalí radicalizes his approach as well as his practices. On the conceptual level, he insists more and more on the active and interpretative aspect of psychic automatism, taking as model the space-time of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. He understands this notion in an erroneous but fruitful way, that is to say as an invisible, active and physical entity whose curvature determines not the trajectory of bodies but their form1. Everything happens as if space-time structures objects in its image, which in turn become soft and curved. Now, "paranoiac-critical" thought, like this space-time, becomes for Dalí an invisible but objective psychic space that no longer limits itself to investing objects but also imprints its own curvature on them. In "The New Colors of Spectral Sex-Appeal" (1934), Dalí thus conceives two new categories of figures. There are first the "phantoms", curved and obese bodies whose volume allows the concretization of subconscious thought. The Hitlerian nurse – who, before Breton's censorship, wore an armband with a swastika – with her tender, rounded and immense back is the archetype. She is found in texts like The Conquest of the Irrational (1935) and in several canvases like The Weaning of the Furniture-Food (1934), The Endless Enigma (1938), The Enigma of Hitler (1938). Radicalizing the category of "phantoms" to the point of reversing it, Dalí then proposes the "specters" which are exemplary of an even more active and even cannibalistic subconscious thought: this one destroys all volume and shapes the structure of the body by curving and decomposing it. The praying mantis which is endowed with a cannibalistic eroticism and which in the pose of preliminary expectation is curved by desire, is the archetype. Now, in Dalí's canvases of 1934-36, spectral figures are omnipresent: let us cite The Specter of Sex-Appeal (1934), where a bony, disarticulated, naked, curved, fossil and partially soft figure imposes itself on the spectator2. Just like the "phantoms", the "specters" are also used by Dalí from 1933 to create or recreate his own myths.

The Rebel Myths of William Tell, Millet's Angelus and Hitler

Again, an important difference separates Breton and Dalí regarding the process of creating "myths". The leader of the surrealist group, like Aragon, theoretically rejects any cultural contribution linked to the old. Henceforth, mythology is to be conceived only in the present of the modern world as during a stroll in Paris. On the level of literary practice, reality is much more complex, for ancient mythology is a paradigm that is indeed mobilized to call into question the established mode of thought and to create new myths3. Already, in Nadja, Breton stages a reality beyond rational logic by associating Nadja with figures from Greek mythology (the Sphinx, the Gorgon, Helen) or the Middle Ages (Melusine).

As for Dalí, conceiving a psychic automatism that is interpretative from the start, he conceives mythical creation as an irrational reappropriation of any element of the present and the past, including ancient myths. Now, it is from 1930 and with Crevel that Dalí reflects on a modern mythology. The first milestone of this collaboration is constituted by "It's Mythology That Changes" (1930), an anonymous text attributed to Crevel but which in reality is written by Dalí and reread by Crevel, as Vicent Santamaria de Mingo pointed out to me and as a manuscript by Dalí at the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation attests. Here, the myth is conceived in opposition to the Freudian idea of a survival of primitive taboos, and is seen as a representation with moral meaning (maternity, old age...) produced by a process of projection-objectification of the affective world, subject to collective transfer. In particular, Dalí supposes that there are symbolic constants in subconscious language, which express themselves over the centuries in all sorts of phenomena: any modern mythology must reactualize them on the collective level, and this by the reappropriation of archaic myths, legendary heroes, figures of the contemporary world, etc. The myths of William Tell, Millet's Angelus and Hitler produced by the Catalan at the beginning of the 1930s precisely appeal to this process of reactualization.

In The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus (1932-1933), Dalí indicates that his productions around William Tell and Millet's Angelus are the masculine and feminine variants of the "immense and atrocious myth of Saturn, Abraham, the Eternal Father with Jesus-Christ", for we are each time faced with parents sacrificing their child. For Dalí, the woman of Millet's Angelus and William Tell do not refer to a peasant woman praying at the hour of the Angelus and to the hero who liberates the Swiss people from foreign tyranny by taking up the challenge of piercing the apple placed on his son's head. The two characters become the paradoxical figures of the mother and father devouring their own child. At the visual level, they are represented by spectral figures, having as model, on the biological level, the praying mantis, an insect with primitive mores that eats the male during mating according to the logic of a cannibalistic and ancestral desire.

In particular, in Millet's Angelus painting (1857-1859), Dalí perceives a three-phase story figuring a devouring mother: the woman is in the pose of the mantis before mating, she mates with her son (act signaled, for example, by the fork stuck in the earth) and kills him. Now, in his productions, Dalí reveals and objectifies this myth according to various colorations. In The Specter of the Angelus (1934), on a background of clouds reproducing the two characters from Millet's painting, he figures a spectral woman who has a soft thigh with a phallic character and who is ready for the cannibal assault (signaled by the raw cutlet). On the other hand, in Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of Conical Anamorphoses (1933), Dalí introduces a political dimension and inverts the roles of man and woman: Gorki with a lobster on his head, observes from an ajar door the face-to-face between Gala, who stands upright in luxurious attire, and Lenin in the pose of the preliminary expectation of the praying mantis. This scene reproduces the posture of the characters of Millet's Angelus, represented above the door, and explicates its irrational meaning on the political level.

As for the myth of William Tell, it is elaborated from 1930 by Dalí who, initially, attributes to it two complementary dimensions: that of the castrating father and that of the hermaphrodite. Thus, in William Tell (1930), a father with an uncovered sex and a pair of scissors in his hand is pointed at by a naked son, whose sex is hidden by a leaf. Parallel to this, in The Old Age of William Tell (1931), William Tell is represented as a hermaphrodite: he has the sexual attributes of man and woman and he concretizes his fantasies with two women behind a sheet. From 1933, a turning point occurs: Dalí is no longer interested in the man-woman relationship and the objectification of erotic delusions; at the time of the conception of the myth of Millet's Angelus, he concentrates solely on the father-son relationship and on the idea of castration. Thus, in The Enigma of William Tell (1933), the legendary character becomes a spectral, cannibalistic and threatening figure for the child he holds in his arms. The visor of the elongated and soft cap takes the form of a tongue ready to engulf the raw cutlet placed on a soft and phallic thigh; the foot seems able to crush the defenseless being in the walnut; finally, the character adopts a posture similar to that of a praying mantis or a shooter preparing to launch an arrow, as if the attack were imminent. The painting also has a political coloring insofar as William Tell is figured under the features of Lenin, and can thus be considered as the counterpart of Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of Conical Anamorphoses (1933).

In Dalí's illustrations of The Songs of Maldoror (1933-1934), these two myths are combined and another dimension emerges: not only do they figure the castrating threat of parents but they also represent a son, Maldoror, who rebels against the excessive authority of the creator father.

As he indicates in the appendix of The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus, Dalí sees in Lautréamont's image of the fortuitous encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table, the myth of Millet's Angelus. He thus represents in one of his illustrations a sewing machine-praying mantis that castrates and devours an umbrella-son in a twilight landscape: the son is here impotent in the face of the castrating mother. Parallel to this and as another illustration of The Songs of Maldoror attests, Dalí sees in the same Lautréamont image the myth of William Tell: the son is no longer defenseless but is represented under the features of William Tell, who with a phallic head, manipulates a sewing machine piercing the apple. The myths of Millet's Angelus and William Tell are therefore associated here in order to illustrate an ambivalent Maldoror, castrated and castrating, dominated and dominating.

Adopting a dialectical approach, Dalí unites what opposes (castrator-castrated, father-son, man-woman, dominant-dominated). He is therefore far from the reactionary behavior denounced by Breton, who in a letter to the Catalan of January 23, 1934 considers the painting The Enigma of William Tell (1933) as an attack against the revolutionary ideology embodied by Lenin as well as an adherence to an academic and "ultra-conscious" style. In reality, Dalí's two myths have a broader subversive scope: it is a veiled critique of any figure of authority castrating the creations and views of their son on the political level (the PCF), on the ethico-aesthetic level (Breton excluding any dissenting opinion) and on the psychosocial level (his father and any father in general); it is also the figuration of the son's rebellion with respect to this type of father.

In a complementary and opposite manner to the productions around Millet's Angelus and William Tell, Dalí's Hitler myth stages a woman with maternal instinct who legitimately nourishes children by favoring their creativity: it is figured, from 1934, by the Hitlerian nurse, a "phantom" who through her voluminous back allows the emergence and concretization of delusions. As Dalí suggests in his text The Conquest of the Irrational (1935) and in his painting The Weaning of the Furniture-Food (1934), this character has a double status: he is at once object and principle of delusion. In other words, the Hitlerian nurse personifies at once the being who concretizes Dalí's paranoiac-critical thought on Hitler as well as the paranoiac-critical thought itself – a sort of nourishing psychic space – which gives rise to delusions. We can then wonder why Dalí chooses Hitler as an object of delusion and as a figure of the very principle of his surrealism. Three aspects are to be considered.

Dali is one of the first surrealists to denounce the danger of the Hitlerian phenomenon and to signal the necessity of considering it seriously. With great coherence, in his letters to Breton of July 1933, of January 1934 until his conference "Por un tribunal terrorista de responsabilidades intelectuales" in Barcelona in 1934, Dalí evokes:

• the incapacity of communists to grasp the new and dangerous character of Hitler. They see in it only a passing phenomenon and adopt idealistic solutions in the face of a political situation that requires a dialectical approach.
• the responsibility of surrealists to adopt a revolutionary attitude in the face of Hitler. Appealing to a subconscious thought that objectifies itself, they are the only ones able to understand and explain integrally the irrational dimension of this political phenomenon. As the approaches between surrealists and communists are distant, any collaboration to counter Hitler is seen as impossible.
• His personal fascination for Hitler, whose delusional thought is capable of breaking any intellectual security and, at the same time, his firmest rejection of Hitlerism. He claims his irresponsibility regarding the obsessive ideas that are his own and above all the cognitive and contestatory scope of his works.

His solid friendship and intellectual complicity with Crevel, whose revolutionary political engagement is beyond doubt, also allows us to nuance Dalí's supposed Hitlerism. Let us recall that over the years, Crevel defends the "moral" scope of the Catalan's mythologies, which stem from their exchanges and a shared political positioning. He is the first to devote two monographs to Dalí and to comment on the myths created by the Catalan. Thus, in Dalí or Anti-Obscurantism (1931), Crevel valorizes the myth of William Tell by putting it in parallel with Freud's Oedipus myth, and explicates the complex that hides there. Before Dalí even affirms it, he sees in this character a father sacrificing his son: a new figure of Abraham sacrificing Isaac or God the father sacrificing Jesus-Christ. In New Views on Dalí and Obscurantism (1933), Crevel returns to this myth by attributing two other dimensions to it: that of Hermaphrodite and that of a son seeking to escape the grip of a castrating father. He also evokes the myth of Millet's Angelus of which Dalí knows how to "illuminate the narrative". Crevel's and Dalí's remarks on these two myths therefore echo each other and nourish each other. It is true that Crevel will never comment on the Catalan's productions around Hitler but these are linked to a common reflection. First, Crevel supports Dalí unconditionally, notably during Breton's attempt to exclude him from the surrealist group in February 1934. Second, he submits his own ideological texts to him in order to have his opinion, as a letter from Dalí of late 1934-early 1935 attests, which Crevel, contrary to his habits, keeps. This document evokes the shared understanding of the Hitlerian phenomenon but the different attitude regarding the possibility of a revolution in collaboration with the communists. Dalí indeed signals that a divergence of perspective regarding political action separates him from Crevel. The latter believes in the intervention of the PCF and in social revolution as a response to the threat of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. Dalí, on the other hand, no longer believes in it: revolution can only be made on the level of the imaginary, for the truly dialectical approach, taking into account delusions in their objectivity, is not envisaged within the PCF. Political action will therefore only fail leaving room for war, seen by Dalí as inevitable: history will prove him right.

Finally, in connection with Dali's progressive disengagement from political action, it is appropriate to emphasize his engagement in surrealist experimentations, the only effective way to know and make known political reality. In 1931, in the company of Crevel, Dalí gives a conference in Barcelona organized by the Marxist party of the Bloc Obrer i Camparol, and emphasizes the community of spirit between the surrealist movement and communism. Over the years, he shows himself however increasingly critical of any political discourse, and in 1935 he refuses to participate actively in "Counter-Attack", a revolutionary struggle movement founded by Breton and Bataille: "Honestly I cannot take an active and militant part in it, because I DON'T BELIEVE IN IT [...]. My moral adherence is entirely with you, but I cannot actively participate in a thing before which I can only think of 'sublimation parodies', continuously"4. To revolutionize life, it is no longer a question of engaging in politics through art, but rather of engaging in art through the reappropriation of any discourse - including political discourse.

Dalí is the only one to explore through the means offered by surrealism, the Hitlerian phenomenon: Crevel understands this approach while Breton does not adhere to it. If he admits the possibility of analyzing this political situation from a surrealist point of view, the latter emphasizes, in an internal inquiry on political positions of 1934, that this examination can only be done on the rational level in order to highlight the process of mystification that is at work in the Hitlerian movement and which affectively exploits the difficulties linked to the Treaty of Versailles and unemployment.

Finally, the fact of figuring Hitler under the features of a nurse who is object and principle of delusion, is a means for Dalí to overcome and discredit Hitlerism by radicalizing the irrational dimension of this phenomenon and by proposing what he calls "sublimation parodies": Hitler is given to be known under the sublimated and parodic form of the woman who, through her delusions, nourishes children.

A Confusionism Within the Surrealist Group

Breton motivates Dalí's exclusion from the surrealist group in 1939 by political motives and takes up, for this purpose, a letter that the Catalan addressed to him in 19355. This temporal gap clearly emphasizes that the real reasons for the expulsion are to be sought elsewhere.

From 1933, Dalí's myths constitute an indirect critique of spiritual fathers and, in particular, a denunciation of Breton's authoritarianism. They also implement an automatism that is fundamentally different from that of the leader of the surrealist group, and propose motifs (like specters) that meet with great success among the intellectuals of the time6. Finally, they integrate elements considered reactionary by Breton (like Hitler and Meissonier) or linked to bestial and cannibalistic instincts, therefore distant from the universe of the marvelous which is his own. Dalí is thus increasingly perceived as a rival in the very domain of surrealism.

In reality, Dalí's myths around William Tell, Millet's Angelus and Hitler have a scope that goes beyond the purely political dimension. Through the convertibility and correspondence of figures, they give to be known, on the irrational level and according to the dialectical approach advocated by the surrealists, the parent-child and man-woman relationships, according to the Freudian drives of "life-death" and "love-hunger". They also constitute a means of resistance to ideological totalitarianisms as well as an instrument to "systematize confusion" within society and the surrealist group itself.