On the Road to the “Manifesto”: The Surrealists’ March Between Blois and Romorantin from May 5 to May 15, 1924

Abstract: This article aims to demonstrate that, in a sense, the 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism” of André Breton was written by walking as a way to reassess its impact in the light of the recent revival of the “manifesto” form in contemporary art. The “Manifesto Marathon” held on October 18–19, 2008, at the Serpentine Gallery in London on the initiative of Hans-Ulrich Obrist enabled some sixty artists to propose manifestos that were subsequently published. It is interesting to note that the artists hardly mention, and in any case that the catalogue never reproduces, the Surrealist ” Manifesto,” which appears totally absent and invisible alongside the Futurist Manifesto (1909), the Dada, Constructivist, and Situationist manifestos, and so on. This is undoubtedly because the Surrealist “Manifesto" is not sufficiently inscribed in our cultural and visual landscape, in our memory or is considered purely literary. From our point of view, however, it is clearly a performative form. The ten-day journey that Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise, and Roger Vitrac made on foot between Blois and Romorantin (Sologne) in the first half of May 1924, just before Breton wrote the Surrealist “Manifesto,” which was published in October 1924, appears as an ironic and distanced response to the Olympic Games, which began in Paris on May 4, 1924. It was a sort of “countermarch,” in the spirit of the nineteenth-century wanderings of Verlaine and Rimbaud, or of the Grand Meaulnes in Alain-Fournier's 1914 novel of the same name. Breton told André Parinaud that it was an "initiatory" journey. Walking has something to do with automatic writing, which in a different way expresses the need for continuous movement, differential speeds and physical and nervous exhaustion. In fact, from March to May 1924, Breton had once again engaged in automatic writing and had even organized it collectively by distributing writing notebooks to the members of the group.