André Breton He was born on February 19, 1896 in Tinchebray (France), the only son of Louis and Marguerite. As a child he moved with his family to Pantin, where he attended the Santa Isabel Religious Institute and then the municipal school in the city, where he was an excellent student.
In 1907 he enrolled as an external at the Chaptal College in Paris, showing a great facility for the German language: it was in those years that he developed his passion for poetry; in 1912, he wrote two poems for “Vers l’idéal“, the school magazine, where he signed with the pseudonym of René Dobrant, an anagram of his name.
The discovery of the works of Huysmans, Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire, brought him closer to the figurative arts, becoming interested in Paul Signac, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Gustave Moreau, while politically involved with anarchism. In 1913 he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and continued writing poems (some published in the magazine “La Falange”), deciding to submit them to the judgment of Paul Valéry, to have an opinion.
Drafted for military service in 1915, Breton wrote the play “December“; the following year he composed – during his stay as a military nurse in Nantes -“Age“, his first prose poem strongly influenced by Rimbau. During this period he also considered pursuing psychiatry.
Back in Paris, he befriended Apollinaire and met Jacques Vache and Joseph Babinski, as well as Philippe Soupault and Pierre Reverdy. He also wrote at the “Mercure de France”, and had relations with Louis Aragon, a medical student. It was thanks to him that, in 1918, he discovered the Count de Lautréamont.
The following year he told Tristan Tzara his participation in the “Dada Manifesto 3”, and together with Soupault and Aragón he founded the magazine “Littérature“, in which Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob and Jean Giraudoux would also collaborate.
Meanwhile, in the Au Sans Pareil his first collection of poems was published, “Mont de Piete“, enriched by the illustrations of André Derain. Passed the exam that allowed him to become a medical assistant, Breton He became a friend of Francis Picabia and in 1920 strongly adhered to the Dadaism.
He then decided to abandon his medical studies and work in the subscription service of the “Nouvelle Revue Française”. He also published “Magnetic Fields“, always with Au Sans Pareil, although he soon got tired of the lack of definition of Dadaism.
In 1921 he accepted Jacques Doucet’s proposal to work as a librarian, and married Simone Kahn; the honeymoon took him to Vienna, where he met Sigmund Freud. In 1923 he published “Clair de terre“, a collection of thirty poems and five stories with a portrait of the author made by Pablo Picasso and”The Lost Steps“, an anthology of articles.
The following year, he signed the first manifesto of surrealism, to which Pierre Naville, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac and Benjamin Peret contributed, among others. For their work and their various activities, Breton is considered one of the main theorists of the surrealist cultural movement.
After closing “Littérature” and founding the magazine, “The Surrealist Revolution”, he took a public position against Anatole France. Meanwhile, the marriage to Simone entered a crisis and, as the provocation of the Surrealists became increasingly political, Breton He chose to get closer to psychiatry, attending public lectures at the Santa Ana hospital.
In 1927 he met Suzanne Muzard, with whom he fell in love and with whom he married the following year, after having divorced Simone, and wrote the “la”Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité“After having carried out a survey on sexuality, published in” The Surrealist Revolution “, he became friends with Salvador Dalí and Georges Sadoul, also becoming passionate about cinema.
In the summer of 1930 the first issue of his new magazine came out “Surrealism at the service of the Revolution“, also publishing the compilations”Slow travaux“,”L’Immaculée Conception” Y “L’Unione libre“.
The expansion of Nazism and the proximity of the war changed his plans: called to arms after the invasion of Poland by Germany, he worked as a military doctor in Poitiers; then publish the “Anthology of black humor“, a work censored after Hitler’s entry into Paris.
Breton, whose name was added to the list of communists, decided to go into exile. He took refuge in the south of France, in Martigues; then he moved to Marseille and boarded a ship bound for Martinique, where he met Aimé Césaire. From there he moved to New York, where he was helped by Peggy Guggenheim, who contributed to his financial maintenance.
Later, he met Elisa Claro, whom he married; after a trip to Canada, Haiti and Santo Domingo, they both returned to France. In Paris, however, André Breton He no longer felt comfortable, largely because of changes in the intellectual sphere.
In 1947 he organized an exhibition with Marcel Duchamp with the intention of relaunching surrealism, but the result was not the best. In 1960, he signed the “Manifest from 121“, aligning himself against the Algerian war.
André Breton He died on September 28, 1966 in Paris, where he had been transferred after suffering a respiratory crisis while on vacation in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie.