Robert Desnos and the Play of Popular Culture

Robert Desnos remains celebrated today as one of Frances most famous surrealist artists and as a hero and martyr of the French Resistance. Robert Desnos and the Play of Popular Culture sheds new light onto both of these facets of his persona and uncovers the fundamental connections between them by analyzing the poets long-standing commitment to the public domain and his involvement with popular media during the 1930s and 1940s. Through analysis of Desnoss regular contributions to the sensationalist 1930s-era magazine Voil , this study begins with consideration of Desnoss turn to popular commercial media after his break with Andr Breton. The study then turns to Desnoss continued engagement with the public sphere of artistic expression under the Occupation and analyzes Bonsoir mesdames, bonsoir messieurs, the 1944 film that Desnos co-authored with Henri Jeanson, which was released in Parisian theatres just one week before Desnoss arrest and deportation for resistance activities. Exploration of these intriguing but surprisingly little-known facets of his artistic production demonstrates that Desnos, far from abandoning his prewar fascination with the power of popular media, sustained and deepened his engagement with public culture as a space of contestation where the interplay of public and private, producer and consumer, intersects with the cultural politics of wartime France. The book includes the full text of Desnoss eleven articles for Voil , which have never been previously collected, with accompanying English translations.