A little on André Breton, Surrealism and René Guénon from Patrick Lepetit, “Surréalisme et ésotérisme,” Mélusine (23 February 2020). Breton cites Guénon favourably in “Du surréalisme en ses oeuvres vives,” Manifestes du surréalisme (Gallimard, 1979), pp. 187–8, n. 1. For an English version, see Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, transl. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (U. Michigan Press), p. 304.
After the Second World
War, a whole group of discreet surrealists, among them Bernard Roger, René
Alleau, Roger Van Hecke, Guy-René Doumayrou, Elie-Charles Flamand and Jean
Palou belonged, under the leadership of another medical man, Dr. Hunwald, to
the Thebah Lodge of the Grande Loge de France, which had briefly been the lodge
of René Guénon. All of them except Jean Palou—who, passing from the Grand Loge
to the Grand Orient via the Grande Loge Nationale Française, saw a glittering
career, and would go on to found lodges and chapters in the Shah’s Iran, before
dying prematurely—remained members until the end. Regarding René Guénon, a
French esotericist who needs no introduction, it should be known that, in 1925,
Breton, who admired him as did Artaud and Queneau, sent Pierre Naville to
suggest that he join the surrealist movement; which the author of The Crisis of the Modern World refused, considering
it the perfect expression of that counter-initiation that he condemned in all
European esoteric societies. Still, in 1953, in an article entitled “René
Guénon jugé par le surréalisme,” and though there is no longer any doubt as to
the reactionary nature of Guénonian thought, Breton said:
