Arriving with a bang on the post-World War I scene, the Surrealists proclaimed a revolution of thought and creation, insisting on breaking away from the past and a world that had been left in ruins. This refusal to integrate into bourgeois society was also a leitmotiv of the Dada movement, a rebellious trait that led André Breton to say that Dadaism was “a machine had not thought to come up with new perspectives. It was this comment that gave birth to Surrealism. The Surrealists frequently collaborated with Dada artists on intellectual levels for which exclusivity had often become the general rule.

In his descriptions of the Surrealists as part of a force of absolute resistance, the author approaches the movement in an exciting and original way. Balanced between provocation and cultural revolution, weren’t the Surrealists most of all the products of creative individualism in this period buffeted by history?