ABSTRACT
With the hardening of European politics into greater militancy, polarization and social instability during the 1930s, the surrealists made strategic alliances to represent their collective views alongside and with other intellectuals, and sympathetic politically conscious groups. In this situation, the surrealists negotiated a path between the slippery slope of communism into Stalinism and its orthodox aesthetic of 'socialist realism' on one side and the rise of fascism within an increasing socially violent intolerance on the other. As surrealists gradually returned to Paris after the French war, with the demise of the old cultural order they were seen as an older establishment. Breton fought on and new, younger members gathered around him in addition to those who returned from exile. While many of the surrealists had continued to work individually in exile, it seems that many of the previous bonds between them were broken.
