Andre Breton Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Andre Breton was born on February 18, 1896, in Tinchebray, Normandy, and grew up in a modest, upward-striving provincial milieu marked by the Third Republic's faith in schooling, reason, and social order. The pull between that orderly surface and the undercurrents of desire, superstition, and dream would define his temperament. His family relocated to Paris while he was still young, placing him in a capital where modernity was accelerating - new psychology, new machines, new politics - and where the arts were beginning to distrust the very idea of "good taste".

World War I arrived as the brutal audit of European rationalism. Breton was mobilized into military medical service and assigned to neurological and psychiatric wards, where shell shock and trauma broke the logic of the old narratives. In these hospitals he encountered language under pressure - slips, hallucinations, compulsions - and began to suspect that the mind's hidden circuits were not marginal but central. The war also pushed him toward a moral absolutism: art would not be ornament, but a weapon against deadened habits of thought.

Education and Formative Influences
Breton studied medicine in Paris and absorbed late-19th-century psychiatry alongside the new continental currents of Freud's psychoanalysis, even as he cultivated a poet's ear. During the war he met Jacques Vache, whose corrosive humor and refusal of conventional meaning became a private myth for Breton. After 1918, Paris Dada provided a further apprenticeship in negation: Tristan Tzara's performances and manifestos taught Breton how to scandalize bourgeois culture, while his own reading - Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Symbolism, and emerging psychoanalytic theory - suggested that the next step was not merely to destroy, but to discover.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
In the early 1920s Breton helped shape the post-Dada avant-garde and, with Philippe Soupault, practiced automatic writing in Les Champs magnetiques (1920), a laboratory for uncensored association. He founded the Bureau of Surrealist Research and published the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defining Surrealism as a method for releasing thought from rational control; the movement soon expanded through journals like La Revolution surrealiste and a circle that included Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, and later Salvador Dali. Breton's novel Nadja (1928) fused memoir, case study, and urban trance into a signature form, and his essays in Les Vases communicants (1932) and L'Amour fou (1937) deepened Surrealism's claim that chance, desire, and dream were objective forces. Politically, he oscillated between revolutionary commitment and fierce independence: he joined the Communist Party in 1927, broke with its discipline, and in 1938 in Mexico co-authored (with Leon Trotsky, under Diego Rivera's auspices) the manifesto "For an Independent Revolutionary Art". During World War II he escaped Vichy France via Marseille and Martinique to the United States, where he became an anchor for Surrealism in exile before returning to France after 1946 to defend the movement against both Cold War conformism and avant-garde fashion.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Breton's inner life reads as a sustained wager that reality is larger than what society permits us to call real. His Surrealism was neither escapism nor mere aesthetics; it was a discipline of attention aimed at the "point of the mind" where contradictions dissolve, where "life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future" are no longer experienced as enemies but as communicating vessels . This was psychological as much as philosophical: he turned the techniques of confession, case history, and dream transcription into instruments for freedom, insisting that a person who has tasted that exaltation "can then renounce his new freedom so easily" only by betraying himself . Beneath the polemics lay an almost devotional longing for an unnamed absolute - the feeling of being pursued by meaning without being able to cage it.

His style balances manifesto severity with erotic lyricism and the shock of juxtaposition. Automatic writing, collage logic, and delirious metaphor were not tricks but ways to let "words make love with one another" until unforeseen truths emerged . In Nadja and L'Amour fou, love becomes the privileged experiment: not romance as comfort, but encounter as revelation, the moment when another person discloses the self to itself. Breton's taste for scandal, his expulsions and feuds, and his cool judgments of fellow artists were extensions of the same drive - to protect an almost sacred intensity from dilution, and to keep the movement's imagination from being domesticated into style.

Legacy and Influence
When Breton died in Paris on September 28, 1966, Surrealism had already spread beyond a group into a worldwide vocabulary - in poetry and painting, film and photography, political posters, theater, advertising, and later the logics of pop and punk. His deepest influence is methodological: the claim that art can be an engine for psychic and social liberation, and that the unconscious is not private fog but a shared frontier. Even critics who recoil from his doctrinal tone continue to work in the space he opened, where dream, desire, and revolt are treated as historical forces rather than personal quirks, and where literature is asked not only to describe the world but to alter the conditions of experience.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Andre, under the main topics: Wisdom - Meaning of Life - Writing - Deep - Freedom.

Other people realated to Andre: Antonin Artaud (Dramatist), Rene Magritte (Artist), Jean Cocteau (Director), Jacques Lacan (Psychologist), Giorgio de Chirico (Artist), Malcolm De Chazal (Writer), Man Ray (Photographer), Marcel Duchamp (Artist), Alfred Jarry (Writer), Yves Tanguy (Artist)

• 1953 Earthlight (Poetry Collection)
• 1947 Ode à Charles Fourier (Book)
• 1946 Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (Poetry Collection)
• 1944 Arcane 17 (Book)
• 1937 L'Amour fou (Novel)
• 1928 Nadja (Novel)
• 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism (Book)

• Wikipedia