Born in February 1896, in France, to a modest family, Breton discovered from his student years the charms and powers of poetry. This always occupied a primordial place in his life, although in 1913 he began medical studies.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Breton was skeptical of the French warlike enthusiasm, although he had to serve in the Department of Health anyway.
His increasingly marked mistrust of the poetic order, which he called "an old set of verses" made him publish in 1919 a series of poems entitled Monte de Piedad and found the magazine Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.
In 1924 Breton defined and affirmed his way of thinking about the Manifesto of Surrealism, which was quickly followed by the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, whose first issue came out in December of that year with the epigraph: man".
The importance of the Manifesto is that it strongly rejects the state of fact, resignation, capitulation and death and offers new possibilities for art. He says: “Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions. Existance is somewhere else". With surrealism, which owes much to Sigmund Freud, the richest of the avant-gardes began. Surrealism, therefore, can be defined as the search for new myths based on the exploration of the unconscious and the possibilities that the encounter of these dissimilar objects offer to art and poetry.
Breton came to Mexico in 1938, believing that this was really "a surreal country." Here is a fragment of his Memory of Mexico:
“Mexico imperiously invites us to this meditation on the purposes of man's activity, with its pyramids made of several layers of stones corresponding to very distant cultures that have covered and darkly penetrated each other. The surveys give the wise archaeologists the opportunity to predict about the different races that succeeded each other in that soil and made their weapons and their gods prevail there.
But many of those moments still disappear under the short grass and are confused from far and near with the mountains. The great message of the tombs, which is spread by ways free of all suspicion much more than it is deciphered, charges the air with electricity.
Mexico, badly awakened from its mythological past, continues to evolve under the protection of Xochipilli, god of flowers and lyrical poetry, and Coatlicue, goddess of the earth and of violent death, whose effigies, dominating in pathos and intensity to all the others exchange from end to end of the national museum, over the heads of the Indian peasants who are its most numerous and most collected visitors, winged words and hoarse cries. This power to reconcile life and death is without a doubt the main attraction that Mexico has. In this regard, it keeps an inexhaustible register of sensations open, from the most benign to the most insidious. "
