French Culture in the 1920s and 1930s

French literary and artistic culture went through dramatic and marked changes in the early twentieth century. Inspired by drastic and even cataclysmic events such as World War I, writers and artists entered new modes and broke ties with the past. A number of movements and philosophies were founded in the postwar years, including Dadaism. An artistic movement based on irrationality, cynicism, and the rejection of conventional aesthetics, Dadaism lost its impetus by the beginning of the 1930s. Many former Dadaists became involved in the surrealist movement, which was led by the influential poet and literary critic André Breton. Surrealism dismissed rationality and incorporated elements of fantasy and the supernatural into art, literature, and drama, in order to construct a positive and absolute reality, or a superreality.

By the early 1920s, Artaud had become a prominent figure in the surrealist movement...