Le Libertinage

Louis Aragon understood “libertinage” as free thought, referring to the seventeenth-century intellectuals who broke with morality and tradition. “Under this ambiguous title,” he said, he gathered in 1923 “short stories, tales, novellas, dialogued scenes,” written between the dispersal of the Dada movement and the formation of the Surrealist group, whose Manifeste du surréalisme, defining both the word and the movement’s aims, Breton would publish in October 1924.

Although dedicated to Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, the book’s true instigator was André Breton — “written for him alone,” though most of the twelve texts had already appeared in periodicals. One of them, “Mademoiselle à sa tour monte,” is explicitly dedicated to Breton and was specially translated for this edition, having previously appeared only in English, in New York in 1922. It is a tale paying homage to Matisse, and stands as a manifesto of modernity: an image of a modern dandyism opposed to that of À rebours, drawing on Matisse’s paintings, papiers collés, advertising, the bare aesthetics of technical objects and Art Nouveau interiors, and silent cinema.

Breton appears above all in another confessional narrative, “Lorsque tout est fini,” which reflects on the “Breton gang” and its “leader,” exploring how permanent revolt, already hardening into dogma, could only be broken through the logic of the “truly indefensible act” — betrayal. A masterly text exploring the impasses of Dada and of anarchy, in light of the overlay of Breton and Bonnot.

The style of these narratives reveals the distance Aragon always kept from any coterie: “L’Armoire à glace un beau soir” and “Au pied du mur” make concessions to automatic writing, while the other texts are composed and betray a novelistic ambition defying Breton’s anathema against the genre. Aragon, a partisan of disorder, refused all injunctions. His virulent preface, a provocative and brilliant apology for love, scandal and anarchy, bears this out: to write is to break with others’ distortion of one’s thought.

A precious copy presented to André Breton, who later entrusted it to Paul Bonet, then newly established as a binder — four years after discovering the craft, at the age of thirty-five. His first bindings would be exhibited the following year at the Musée Galliera and at the Exposition des Arts du livre français, where his talent went unnoticed. Nevertheless, as he notes in his Carnets, these exhibitions brought him “a few commissions for half-bindings … This was my real beginning, and I knew no bibliophiles.”

This Art Deco half-binding is one of the very first executed for André Breton, in the distinctive titling of Bonet’s early manner. Invited to Brussels by the bookseller Simonson, Bonet there met René Gaffé, who entrusted him with binding Surrealist authors for the first time: first the complete set of La Révolution surréaliste, then four titles by Aragon — Anicet, Le Traité du style, Le Libertinage and Le Paysan de Paris. The Manifeste du surréalisme and Ralentir travaux followed, leading to Bonet’s meeting with Breton and Paul Éluard.

Éluard was the first to entrust work to Bonet — beginning with his own copy of Nadja in February 1931 — while Breton commissioned a group of bindings and half-bindings from him in October, almost certainly including this one. In his Carnets, Bonet describes only the two full bindings commissioned by Breton, but mentions “various other bindings on works by Breton and Éluard” for the two poets and for the bibliophile René Gaffé.

Our Breton copy and the Gaffé copy are the only two bindings by Paul Bonet on Le Libertinage.

André Breton enriched it with his celebrated bookplate, “Le Tamanoir,” designed and engraved by Salvador Dalí around 1930 (photogravure in black, 60 x 40 mm, printed on laid paper).

From the libraries of André Breton (bookplate and inscription) and Paul Destribats (I, no. 147).