ABSTRACT
In Aragon's analysis, the responsibility for Surrealism's lack of contact with a mass public lay entirely at the door of the bourgeois publishers who refused to make their work widely available, fearing its revolutionary content. In retrospect, the Federation, like certain pacifist movements at the time, can be seen to have played into the hands of those who followed a politics of appeasement with regard to Hitler. The street stands not only for the early Surrealist program of "love and revolution" or, in the slightly different terms employed by Breton as late as 1935 in a famous speech, for the union of Rimbaud's watchword "Change life" with Marx's injunction "Transform the world". The dilemma presented by the salon was not only social and financial, however. It was also a question of aesthetics, and in that sense the further French meaning of salon, that of a large collective art exhibition, also comes into play.
