What if so many Surrealists (Aragon, Eluard, Tzara) hadn't become Stalinists? The beginnings of this can be traced back to 1930 when Louis Aragon and Georges Sadoul (who like the other leading Surrealists of this period, including Breton, had joined the French Communist Party [PCF]) visited the USSR. Apparently, their original reasons for the visit were personal--Aragon's Russian-born wife Elsa Triolet wanted to see her sister again; and Sadoul feared that he might be imprisoned as the result of a lawsuit. However, once there, they were invited to attend the plenary session of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature in Kharkov, and before their return to France they had confessed to a series of "mistakes"--"They had developed their activities outside the control of the party, had not been seriously militant within the party, and had allowed journalists to criticize the party in surrealist periodicals." Worse, they "vowed to renounce all idealism (Freudianism, in particular) and to combat Trotskyism, while withdrawing their support from the Second [Surrealist] Manifesto." Gerard Durozoi, *History of the Surrealist Movement*, p. 231.
As one might expect, Aragon and Sadoul got a chilly reception from the Surrealists when they returned home. There was an attempt at a reconciliation for a while, but the final break came with the publication in 1931 of Aragon's poem *Front Rouge* (Red Front) which contained the lines
Descendez les flics
Camarades
descendez les flics
[...]
Feu sur Léon Blum
Feu sur Boncour Frossard Déat
Feu sur les ours savants de la social-démocratie
Feu feu j'entends passer
la mort qui se jette sur Garchery Feu vous dis-je
Sous la conduite du parti communiste
SFIC
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Romanistik/Aragon/werk/frueh/perper_z.htm
Which can be translated:
Kill the cops
Comrades
Kill the cops
[...]
Fire on Léon Blum
Fire on Boncour Frossard Déat
Fire on the performing bears of the social-democracy
Fire fire I can hear death
Assaulting Garchery. Fire I tell you
Under the leadership of the Communist party
French section of the Communist International
(The people who were to be fired on were mostly bourgeois politicians of one sort or another, including Socialists. Garchery was a former Communist deputy who had broken with the party.) Anyway, Aragon was indicted and charged with incitement to murder--he potentially faced five years in prison. Breton defended Aragon, but it was a defense that neither Aragon nor the PCF could accept: that a poet cannot be held criminally responsible for his lines, because poetry comes from the subconscious, the poet produces a meaning of which he is not the master, etc. This led to a dispute between Breton and the party newspaper *L'Humanité* resulting in a final break between the Surrealists and Aragon.
Within several years Eluard and others were to join Aragon in the Stalinist camp. By the time of the Resistance during the Second World War, they were writing poems in rhyme and even Alexandrines celebrating France and Liberty, being careful to do nothing to alienate the "progressive" bourgeoisie or even "progressive" Catholics. When an anthology of Resistance poems was published entitled *The Honor of the Poets* Breton's friend Benjamin Peret wrote a scathing reply called *The Dishonor of the Poets*: he noted the mediocrity of most of the poem in the anthology, and added that "The honor of these 'poets' consists in ceasing to be poets in order to become advertising agents." "Any 'poem' which exalts a voluntarily undefined 'freedom'--when it is not embellished with religious or nationalist attributes--ceases first of all to be a poem, and then constitutes an obstacle to the total liberation of man, for it deceives him in showing him a 'freedom' which hides new chains." This was pretty much the view of all the remaining Surrealists. Gerard Durozoi, *History of the Surrealist Movement*, p. 444.
Some of the ex-Surrealists turned Stalinists were unimportant, but there is no doubt that in Aragon and Eluard at least, the Surrealists lost two very talented writers. Was this loss inevitable? I am not sure--maybe if Aragon had never met Elsa Triolet he would never have become a Stalinist. Eluard did not become one until considerably later--the Spanish Civil War and then the Resistance led him to rejoin the PCF (I believe he did not formally rejoin until World War II, though his sympathies were already clear by the late 1930's). He was not a very sophisticated man, politically, and the PCF's claim that only it was really fighting fascism (while people like Breton were living safely in the US during World War II) no doubt appealed to him.
As one might expect, Aragon and Sadoul got a chilly reception from the Surrealists when they returned home. There was an attempt at a reconciliation for a while, but the final break came with the publication in 1931 of Aragon's poem *Front Rouge* (Red Front) which contained the lines
Descendez les flics
Camarades
descendez les flics
[...]
Feu sur Léon Blum
Feu sur Boncour Frossard Déat
Feu sur les ours savants de la social-démocratie
Feu feu j'entends passer
la mort qui se jette sur Garchery Feu vous dis-je
Sous la conduite du parti communiste
SFIC
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Romanistik/Aragon/werk/frueh/perper_z.htm
Which can be translated:
Kill the cops
Comrades
Kill the cops
[...]
Fire on Léon Blum
Fire on Boncour Frossard Déat
Fire on the performing bears of the social-democracy
Fire fire I can hear death
Assaulting Garchery. Fire I tell you
Under the leadership of the Communist party
French section of the Communist International
(The people who were to be fired on were mostly bourgeois politicians of one sort or another, including Socialists. Garchery was a former Communist deputy who had broken with the party.) Anyway, Aragon was indicted and charged with incitement to murder--he potentially faced five years in prison. Breton defended Aragon, but it was a defense that neither Aragon nor the PCF could accept: that a poet cannot be held criminally responsible for his lines, because poetry comes from the subconscious, the poet produces a meaning of which he is not the master, etc. This led to a dispute between Breton and the party newspaper *L'Humanité* resulting in a final break between the Surrealists and Aragon.
Within several years Eluard and others were to join Aragon in the Stalinist camp. By the time of the Resistance during the Second World War, they were writing poems in rhyme and even Alexandrines celebrating France and Liberty, being careful to do nothing to alienate the "progressive" bourgeoisie or even "progressive" Catholics. When an anthology of Resistance poems was published entitled *The Honor of the Poets* Breton's friend Benjamin Peret wrote a scathing reply called *The Dishonor of the Poets*: he noted the mediocrity of most of the poem in the anthology, and added that "The honor of these 'poets' consists in ceasing to be poets in order to become advertising agents." "Any 'poem' which exalts a voluntarily undefined 'freedom'--when it is not embellished with religious or nationalist attributes--ceases first of all to be a poem, and then constitutes an obstacle to the total liberation of man, for it deceives him in showing him a 'freedom' which hides new chains." This was pretty much the view of all the remaining Surrealists. Gerard Durozoi, *History of the Surrealist Movement*, p. 444.
Some of the ex-Surrealists turned Stalinists were unimportant, but there is no doubt that in Aragon and Eluard at least, the Surrealists lost two very talented writers. Was this loss inevitable? I am not sure--maybe if Aragon had never met Elsa Triolet he would never have become a Stalinist. Eluard did not become one until considerably later--the Spanish Civil War and then the Resistance led him to rejoin the PCF (I believe he did not formally rejoin until World War II, though his sympathies were already clear by the late 1930's). He was not a very sophisticated man, politically, and the PCF's claim that only it was really fighting fascism (while people like Breton were living safely in the US during World War II) no doubt appealed to him.