Background
Breton, Andre was born on February 19, 1896 in Tinchebray, France. French poet and a founder of the Surrealist movement. Breton, the son of a Norman shopkeeper, was born in Tinchebray, Department of Orne, Feb. 19, 1896. Drawn to literature in his lycéelycee years, he befriended such figures as the poet Paul Valéry.Valery. Breton studied medicine, hoping to specialize in mental diseases. Serving in World War I, he was aghast at the slaughter that he saw.
Education
Student Faculte de Medicine de Paris, Sorbonne. Studied Am.
Career
He turned to writing in an effort to aid men in tapping new emotional and imaginative forces, believing that the bankruptcy of science and of rationalism could be offset only by a growth of man's unconscious powers. From the outset Breton, as leader of those who went by the name of Surrealists (Louis Aragon, Benjamin Péret,Peret, Philippe Soupault), attempted not to destroy man, but to shake him off his precarious balance and out of his complacency, and to help him transcend his chaos through an enrichment of consciousness.
Between 1916, when Breton met at Nantes a legendary and mysterious figure, Jacques Vaché,Vache, who impressed him deeply, and 1924, he was associated with the eccentric dada movement, which had originated in Zürich.Zurich. Breton studied Freud and a number of rebel poets: William Blake, Lautréamont,Lautreamont, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The last-named, who died in 1918, had coined the word surrealism. By 1922 Breton's imperious temperament had asserted itself; he broke with dadaism and published the first surrealist manifesto. This was followed in 1928 by an epochmaking work, Le SurréalismeSurrealisme et la peinture, and in 1930 by the graver and more philosophical second surrealist manifesto. In 1935 Breton parted ways with Communism, which had at first attracted several surrealists as a bold endeavor to change man. He condemned the materialism inherent in Marxism and the dishonest view of Soviet leaders that the end justifies any means.
Breton proved an original poet, though hardly a great one, in several volumes of verse, such as Le Revolver àa cheveux blancs (1932). His impact on painting was more profound and more lasting: for a decade or two, most younger painters in France and other countries (the German Max Ernst, the Italian Giorgio di Chirico, the Spaniards Salvador Dali and Joan Miró,Miro, the Frenchmen AndréAndre Masson and Yves Tanguy, and several Americans) discovered their vocation through surrealism. Breton was a tyrannical group leader, intolerant of dissent, and many of his disciples broke with his rigid tyranny. However, he never ceased being respected for his artistic integrity. Breton's literary masterpieces are his mysterious and delicate novel Nadja (1928); a book on the invasion and enrichment of waking life by dreams, Les Vases communicants (1932); and two exalted volumes in honor of love, L'Amour fou (1937) and Arcane 17 (1945).
Breton aimed at opening up to literature the lands, as yet uncharted, of the subconscious and of dreams, even of insanity; at rehabilitating love and praising woman as the interpreter of life's mysteries; and at luring modern man toward a new and suprarational equilibrium. Surrealism, which had at first put on airs of eccentric immorality, became in fact a search for a new ethics. The Marquis de Sade, the 17th-century theologian Cornelis Jansen, and the Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat were precursors.
After serving in the medical corps of the French army in 1939-1940, Breton came to the United States in 1941. He returned to Paris in 1945 and resumed his activity as a writer. His subsequent works included Entretiens (1952), La CléCle des champs (1953), and L'Art magique (1957). Although Breton's literary influence began to decline after the late 1940's, due to the supplanting of surrealism as an aesthetic force by other movements, his place was already among the masters of modern French prose.