MESSAGE TO THE SURREALIST GROUP
{The following message to the Surrealist Group in Paris was Signed by Pierre Frank for the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International and by Michel Lequenne for the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, the French section of the Fourth International. ]
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The death of André Breton is a grievous blow for us and in the name of our party and the entire Fourth International we send you our condolences which we ask you to transmit to his companion and his daughter.
More than. the great writer, the pure poet, the surrealist “who opened the way to the deepest subterranean sources of humanity's cultural. heritage, the innovator who worked the intellectual soil of our times so profoundly that after him no one remained unchanged, it was the inflexible fighter -- as you will readily understand -- who was close to us and whom we most admired, whom we loved.
The intellectual road he followed was exemplary. From the beginning, among the surrealists, he understood that he could not create except in the path of the revolution, and he took that path, bringing along his entire movement, without humility or concessions, in the face of cruel rebuffs and narrow-minded disputes placed in his way --~ the first manifestations of the disease of bureaucratism spreading within the world Communist movement.
The Stalinist degeneration reserved for him the worst tests to which so many others succumbed who lacked his intellectual and moral stature. In the tidal wave of slime, of insults, slander, murder and desertions, he held strong, he spoke up for the truth, stood like enduring granite.
His mind found a similar one in Trotsky and their two names remain linked in history through the manifesto to the revolutionary writers and artists demarcating the line between genuine men and © eunuchs.
Since then, at any time of grave trouble we knew he would be there, and also in times of sorrow. He was there with the signers of the Manifesto of 121 and he stood at the grave of Natalia Sedova.
We will never forget that his last public act was to cast the weight of his great name behind the appeal for our comrade, the heroic Peruvian revolutionist Hugo Blanco...
‘André Breton, too, was a revolutionist. We can pay him no higher honor than to say that, at the moment he leaves us, which is also the time when he is being discovered by thousands upon thousands of youth.
We know that you will let us revere his memory and his works as those of one of us, for the same reasons that you consider Leon Trotsky one of yours. We are convinced that his memory and his example will assure continuation of the combat alliance between the surrealists and the Trotskyists. , _ an
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