Le « droit à la ville » surréaliste

La quête lyrique entre appropriation urbaine et inconscient dans la prose des surréalistes français

Abstract

This study examines the intersection between surrealist thought and urban sociology through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. We demonstrate how certain surrealist texts from the 1920s anticipate later sociological reflections on urban space. The article first establishes the connections between Lefebvre and the surrealist group, then explores the distinction between conceived space and lived space and the right to the city as creative appropriation. The analysis focuses particularly on four novels: Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Desnos’s Liberty or Love, Breton’s Nadja, and Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris. These works reveal how their protagonists practice a form of right to the city avant la lettre, transforming Paris into a terrain of poetic appropriation. Urban wandering functions both as a metaphor for surrealist writing and as resistance to capitalist rationalization. The article demonstrates surrealism’s influence on the human sciences and reveals surrealist geopoetics as an early form of militant urban critique.