André Breton, Surrealism and René Guénon

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:

Always soliciting the intellect (esprit), never the heart, René Guénon receives our greatest deference, and nothing else. Surrealism, while associating itself with what is essential in his critique of the modern world, relying, with him, upon supra-rational intuition (found by other paths), even strongly feeling the attraction of that thought called “Traditional” which, with a the hand of a master, he has combed of all its parasites, repudiates as much the reactionary that he was at the social level as the disdainer of, for example, Freud, which he has shown himself to be. He is not the less honoured on this account as a great solitary adventurer, who repelled faith with knowledge, opposed deliverance to salvation, and unearthed metaphysics from the ruins of religion that covered them.

One has seen more virulent condemnations.