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Universal feeling is composed and inferred from the right that everyone has to an opinion in the moral domain…

Handwritten notebook

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Louis Aragon, Dr Joseph-François-Félix Babinski, Henri Barbusse, Maurice Barrès, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, Benjamin Constant, André Derain, Jacques Doucet, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Marcel Duhamel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Sigmund Freud, Maxime Gorki, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Emmanuel Kant, Mühlfel, Napoléon 1er, Alphonse Rabbe, Jacques Rigaut, Léon Tolstoï, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia, Benjamin Péret, Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara, Albert Einstein

Description

André Breton’s handwritten notebook dating from 1920 - 1921.

Published in the second section of unpublished texts in the first volume of the Œuvres complètes, this notebook dating from the end of 1920 and the beginning of 1921 is a kind of diary, noting less states of mind than reflections and quotes from books (Freud is already included) or friends (writers like Aragon, Rigaut, Soupault, Drieu le Rochelle and Éluard and painters like Derain and Jacques-Émile Blanche). But also situations, scenes observed in the street, or experiences — Aragon and Breton trying to register with the Socialist Party... ‘I must keep the secret of poetry’, writes Breton, aiming at the future and refusing to be satisfied with techniques of automatism discovered only a year earlier. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Handwritten notebook, dated from late 1920 to July 1921.
—14 pages in-12 in blue ink with erasures and corrections under a black cardboard cover: ‘Its irreplaceable interest is to take us into his internal life at a time when decisive concerns were occupying him on a quite dark ground and he was experiencing temptations towards abandonment..., the notebook reveals essential aspects of Breton's interest in Freud and the influence of psychoanalysis regarding the Champs magnétiques project... Breton returned to this notebook two years later when writing La Confession dédaigneuse, drawing several passages from it for the new text.’
— An original photograph (10.8 x 6.2 cm) is attached, representing a medieval castle keep. [auction catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton, Divers, Inédits II, Œuvres complètes, volume I (Edited by Marguerite Bonnet with contributions from Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1988, 613-23.

Exhibition places