ANDRÉ BRETON

(1896 - 1966)
BOOKS ::: POET ::: ART ::: DADA ::: SURREALIST :::

Writer. Surrealist Founder. Surrealist Manifesto. La Revolution surrealiste. Mad Love. Nadja.

André Breton didn’t just write poems — he tried to reprogram reality. Trained in medicine and working in neurological wards during World War I, he watched shell-shocked soldiers speak in fractured, dreamlike language and realized the mind was not orderly at all. Logic was a costume; underneath lived desire, fear, memory, and images that behaved more like dreams than thoughts. Breton concluded that society was built on repression, and art’s job was not decoration but liberation.

Out of that idea he forged Surrealism. The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) argued that reason had led Europe into mechanized slaughter, so the unconscious should be trusted more than rationality. Automatic writing, chance encounters, found objects, irrational juxtapositions — these weren’t gimmicks but tools meant to bypass polite consciousness. Books like Nadja and Mad Love treated the city itself as a psychic landscape where coincidence revealed hidden order. The magazine La Révolution surréaliste functioned less like a publication and more like a conspiracy: painters, poets, and photographers collaborating to sabotage ordinary perception.

Breton could be doctrinaire, even tyrannical toward fellow artists, yet his core idea endured: imagination was not escapism but a way of seeing truth more clearly. Surrealism seeped into film, advertising, fashion, pop music, and later counterculture — dreams became a legitimate form of knowledge. The movement’s real achievement wasn’t a style but a permission: reality didn’t have to be accepted as given. It could be rearranged.

Click here for The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) Reimagined (2026)