A Cry of the Spirit

Born in 1904, Naville, a poet and painter, joined the Paris surrealist group in 1924. The surrealists sought to challenge all existing conventions; they concluded that they could not revolutionize art without also making a revolution in society.

As their declaration of January 1925 put it, “Surrealism is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the spirit . . . determined to smash its fetters. If necessary with material hammers.” But where were these “material hammers” to be found? The surrealists remained confined to gesture politics — for example, writing open letters to hated authority figures such as the Pope.

In 1925, Naville was called up for military service. While in the army, he took the risky decision to become active as a communist, distributing leaflets in the barracks opposing France’s colonial war in Morocco; he was imprisoned for a month. Now he began to look for a way forward beyond surrealist revolt. He joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1926.

In that same year he wrote a pamphlet, Revolution and Intellectuals, which was to have a considerable influence on the surrealist milieu. Naville had decided to commit himself to political activity in the communist movement, and he was challenging his surrealist friends to follow his example.

He wanted them to move beyond a negative and anarchistic approach in favor of the disciplined action of working-class struggle, and to commit themselves to what he saw as the only revolutionary path, namely the Marxist one. He reminded his surrealist comrades that “the bourgeoisie is not afraid of so-called left intellectuals. . . . The masses are agents of revolutionary force; they do not need the always suspect assistance of intellectuals.”

He also confronted them with the following question:

Do the Surrealists believe in the liberation of the spirit prior to the abolition of bourgeois conditions of material life, or do they consider that a revolutionary spirit can be created only after the revolution has been accomplished?

His argument clearly had an impact, for in 1927 five surrealists, including Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard, joined the PCF.

Communism and Trotskyism

As a communist, Naville became a key figure in the journal Clarté, launched in 1919 by the anti-war novelist Henri Barbusse in support of the Russian Revolution. But he also became an activist: in his autobiography, he describes his work in the party cell attached to the Farman aircraft factory at Billancourt in Paris, giving out leaflets, holding factory gate meetings, and selling papers at tube stations.

It is interesting to compare Naville’s political evolution with those of other surrealists, such as Breton and Aragon. Breton briefly joined the PCF but felt incapable of giving a report on the economic situation in Italy to a cell meeting for gas workers. Aragon became a lifelong communist, but he also developed into a loyal Stalinist who abandoned all surrealist principles.

Naville’s revolutionary ideas soon brought him into conflict with the increasingly Stalinist Communist Party. He visited Russia in 1927, at the time of Leon Trotsky’s expulsion from the party. There he met Trotsky and also Victor Serge, a revolutionary journalist and a leading figure in the Left Opposition.

Largely under Naville’s influence, Clarté became a journal of the Trotskyist Left Opposition, changing its name to Lutte de Classes (“Class Struggle”). In the rebranded magazine, he published a section of Serge’s book Year One of the Russian Revolution,  which contrasted the revolution’s early years with its later degeneration. Clarté had already published Serge’s account of the failed Chinese revolution in 1927.

Naville was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928. But the PCF had not yet been totally taken over by Stalinism. His local section spent two whole days debating his expulsion and the questions that arose from it.

He also broke with the surrealist group, which Breton increasingly ran as though it were a political sect. Breton denounced Naville for the rather bizarre reason that he was taking money from his father, who was a banker, to finance revolutionary publications — surely it was a commendable activity to divert cash from a capitalist to use for a revolutionary cause? It was some time before Breton also made a clean break with Stalinism, though he eventually identified with Trotsky and joined him in publishing a manifesto on revolutionary art.

In 1929, Naville, with his wife, Denise, visited the exiled Trotsky in Turkey. They discussed a plan whereby Trotsky would escape to France by yacht, although this came to nothing. He became active in the international Trotskyist movement; in 1930, he was in Berlin, helping to organize the Left Opposition there.

In the early years of the Trotskyist movement, Naville worked closely with Alfred Rosmer, a former revolutionary syndicalist and veteran of the Communist International. At one point, Trotsky seemed distrustful of Naville for being too much of an intellectual, preferring the youthful enthusiasm of Raymond Molinier. Rosmer’s wife, Marguerite, wrote to Trotsky defending Pierre and Denise Naville: “They sell papers at 6:00 a.m., leaflet factory gates — that’s deintellectualizing them, I assure you.”

In 1934, Naville opposed the decision by the French Trotskyists to work inside the Socialist Party. However, he accepted the discipline of the organization and remained active in the Trotskyist movement.

In 1938, Rudolf Klement — the man who was responsible for organizing the founding conference of the Fourth International, launched by Trotsky as an alternative to Stalinism — was kidnapped by Soviet agents, beheaded, and thrown into the river Seine. As a result, much of the secretarial work involved in founding the Fourth International fell upon Naville’s shoulders. In particular, he prepared a membership report identifying the small groups of anti-Stalinist revolutionaries in countries all around the world.

Denise Kahn

Naville had married Denise Kahn in 1926, and she would remain his companion and comrade until her death in 1969. Her development during those years revealed the deep ambiguities in the surrealist attitude toward women — there were no women in Breton’s original group.

Denise was welcomed by the surrealists, hailed as a muse. Breton, Aragon, and Éluard wrote poems to her. But she was not encouraged to become a “creative” writer; instead, she worked as a translator.

Born into a French-speaking family resident in Germany, she was perfectly bilingual in French and German, and over the next forty years she translated a wide range of literary, political, and sociological texts, making a major contribution to French intellectual life. Her translations included the work of Friedrich Engels (The Dialectics of Nature) and Nikolai Bukharin, as well as Carl von Clausewitz’s On War.

As Pierre moved from surrealism to Trotskyism, Denise was active together with him and put her talents at the service of the movement. She visited Trotsky in exile and helped him prepare German versions of his books.

In 1934, she accompanied Trotsky to Copenhagen, where he lectured on the Russian Revolution to an audience of more than two thousand people. She translated numerous articles for the Trotskyist press and organized the publication in France of material from the Russian Left Opposition.

An Independent Marxist

However, Pierre Naville did not remain for long in the Trotskyist movement. In 1939, in face of the impending outbreak of war, Trotsky urged his followers in France to join the new organization formed by Marceau Pivert, whose followers had been excluded from the Socialist Party. The American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon came to Paris to enforce the tactic. Naville refused to follow the new line and broke his links with organized Trotskyism. Yet he remained committed to Marxism and continued to think highly of Trotsky as an individual.

After being drafted into the French army in 1939, he spent some time in a German POW camp during the war but was released on health grounds. Under the German occupation of France, he published two books.

One was a study of the eighteenth-century philosopher Paul-Henri d’Holbach, in which Naville claimed that Marx’s ideas owed more to Enlightenment materialism than to the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The other was a study of the behaviorist psychology of J. B. Watson. Both works were intended to serve as a defense of materialism against the idealist and religious ideas promoted by the pro-German Vichy regime, whose slogan was “Work, Family, and Motherland.”

For the rest of his life, Naville wrote prolifically, publishing books on psychology, sociology, and military strategy. He contributed widely to the left press, polemicizing with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others in defense of his understanding of Marxism.

He was particularly interested in examining Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation, regarding this as more significant than the young Marx’s preoccupation with alienation. He was also concerned with wages and working hours and insisted that workers’ control must be at the very center of the socialist project. Naville wrote extensively about the states of the Eastern bloc, especially in his seven-volume work The New Leviathan, where he condemned the regime in the USSR as imperialist and an obstacle to socialist renewal.

At the same time, he never abandoned political activism. At the end of the war, he launched a new publication, La Revue Internationale. The Liberation was a period of intellectual ferment, and Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes had considerable influence. Naville’s aim was to produce a rival journal that would be explicitly Marxist.

The journal maintained a consistently high standard, carrying for example David Rousset’s writings on his experiences in a German concentration camp. However, it faced continuing financial problems and failed to take off, ceasing publication in 1951.

Combative Memories

Naville also wanted to help develop a political alternative to the main organizations of the French left: the irredeemably Stalinist PCF and the Socialist Party, which was increasingly committed to French colonialism and its wars in Indochina and Algeria.

In 1960, a sizable group of Socialist Party members who could no longer tolerate their party’s Algerian policy merged with other left groups to found the Parti Socialiste Unifié (United Socialist Party or PSU). Naville helped to draft the PSU’s founding statement, and was a member of the party leadership, twice standing as a parliamentary candidate. In the 1960s and ’70s, the PSU had a considerable influence in developing an independent left pole in France.

Though one might criticize some of Naville’s particular intellectual and political stances, it is clear that he remained loyal to the principles that had inspired him from the 1920s onward. In the preface to a book on surrealism, published shortly before his death in 1993, he wrote:

It is not simply a question of keeping alive memories: it is also highly necessary to draw on these memories as a source of combative action that is capable of resisting oppression of all kinds. We are still, and for a long time to come, the rebellious victims of this oppression.