In the 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism), André Breton is a provocative polemicist; in the 1929 Second Manifeste (Second Manifesto), he becomes an excommunicating pope. However, in the oft-overlooked Prolégomenes a un troisieme manifeste, ou pas (Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto, or Not), Breton makes the following declaration:

So what if my own line – that admittedly twists and turns – passes through Heraclitus, Abelard, Eckhardt, Retz, Rousseau, Swift, Sade, Lewis, Arnim, Lautréamont, Engels, Jarry, and a few others? From them I have constructed a system of coordinates for my own use, a system that stands up to the test of my own personal experience and therefore appears to me to include some of tomorrow's chances.

This is a Breton looking to the ‘correlations of exceptions’ of the past in order to gesture tentatively towards the future, amid the ‘occultation’ of 1941. Starting at Bretonian Surrealism's dark night of the soul – in exile, its political convictions of the 1930s cast adrift in the wake of the Occupation – allows us to see Surrealism as an avant-garde, that is, as moving forwards with something in tow. Breton positions himself within a vast lineage. This Surrealism's precursors are not only the familiar figures of the Manifeste (Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry), and the Engels of the Second Manifeste, but also a Greek atomist, monks and mystics, and a cardinal. Breton's sinuous line brings together figures from across history to form a personal cartography of precursors and escape route into the future.