Questioning the Avant-Garde

Abstract The global symbolic destitution that was at the core of the revolutionary months of May and June 1968 forced the Parisian surrealist group to entirely rethink its vocabulary and means of action. The aim of this article is to study these fundamental evolutions marking a shift in surrealism’s history regarding its relationship to an avant-gardist conception of revolution, still inherited, despite the rupture with the French Communist Party, from a Leninist scope. The Paris Surrealist collective, as such, was no longer effective and dissolved itself in the protest movement. Analyzing surrealist commitments in different action committees allows us to understand how these organizing structures representative of May ’68 confront surrealism, including its own internal functioning. It also gives new clues for understanding the dissolution, a few months later, of the Parisian surrealist group.