ABSTRACT
In the postwar France to which Breton returned in 1946, he struggled to regain his position as the leader of a movement that had changed considerably during his five-year exile. The tensions between those who had left and those who had stayed, plus the rise of a new generation of Surrealists, meant that there was anticipation that he would find some way to respond to people's expectations. As Breton moved away from his earlier commitment to political action, it has been observed that the role of the myth became central to the realisation of his vision of a new postwar society. Once he had broken with the Communist Party in 1935 and after the failure of the FIARI in 1938, Breton shifted his position, ultimately rejecting the constraints of dialectical materialism and turning instead towards freedom and the use of poetry to realise his goal.
