With Catholic petit bourgeois origins in a Parisian suburb, André Breton had a ‘modern’ education (in other words without either Greek or Latin) which designated him for a scientific career. He in effect finished his studies in medicine but practically never practiced it. He published his first poems in a neo-Symbolist review (La Phalange) during the First World War and in 1919 founded, along with Aragona and Soupault, the journal Littérature, which gathered underneath the banner of the Dada movement. In 1924 he published his The Surrealist Manifesto, initially the preface for a book (Soluble Fish) which gathered together texts written through the automatic writing technique. It is the first theoretical work initiating the Surrealist movement, which Breton described in the following way: ‘Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and exempt from any aesthetic or moral concerns. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association which have been neglected up until now, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought.’ He joined the Communist Party in 1927. In The Second Surrealist Manifesto, which appeared in 1929, he tried to relaunch the movement by reconciling Freud and Marx in order to serve the proletariat. For him literature was none other than a form of action: in 1930 he moreover founded a periodical entitled Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution, nonetheless never hesitating to criticise Communist leaders and Stalinism in particular. During the Second World War he went into self imposed exile in the United States. After the war, he continued to write numerous texts on literature and above all championed the concept of ‘primitive art.’