48

Photography and surrealism

49

What is a surrealist photograph?

Berton is woven into a more complex and deeper enigmatic set of meanings pertaining to attitudes to women, men and death (so often linked with issues of sexuality) within the rhetoric of the image itself. It is here that we must delve a little more into the history-work (dream-work) of the Germaine Berton case to unearth the social-cultural chains of association that led to these things being in the image in the rst place.

Death, Politics and SexAt the age of twenty Germaine Berton walked

into the office of L’Action Française on January and requested an interview with two of its key gures Charles Maurras (the anti-Semite in the ‘Dreyfus affair’) and Léon Daudet. L’Action Française was an impor-tant right-wing newspaper and an inuential political organization with popular support (among Catholics, aristocratic families and monarchist sympathizers) and the Republican government. Having failed to see the two people she intended to kill, she obtained an inter-view with Marius Plateau whom she then ‘shot several times’. She was stopped from turning the gun on herself as she had supposedly intended.69 The man she had shot dead, Marius Plateau, was general secretary of a Royalist group called ‘Camelots du Roi’, an organized political group for young thugs, ‘rioting’ boys, ‘hawkers of the king’, a ghting wing instigated by the L’Action Française in . They had orchestrated ‘impressive student riots’.70 They sold party newspapers and as political agitators were involved in instigating demonstrations and (organized) beatings of political opponents.7 The Camelots group avenged Plateau’s murder by wreck-ing premises of left-wing newspapers (L’Oeuvre, L’Ere nouvelle and Bonsoir) and beat up socialist deputies. Although Germaine Berton had stated that she was an anarchist, L’Action Française published articles claiming that she was part of an international conspiracy against them and the policies of the French government. The editor, Léon Daudet, one of her would-be victims, wrote arguing that her assassination ‘plan’ had been the miscarriage of a whole plot by the French ‘pro-German police’. He claimed that the murder had been part of a plan to kill the president of France (Alexandre

See Eugen Weber, Action Française; Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), p. .

By all accounts, the riots were caused by the insults that a university lecturer had made about Jeanne d’Arc, the adopted (unofficial) nationalist saint of L’Action Française (see Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, Vol. [Penguin, ], p. ).

See Edward R. Tannen-baum, The Action Française: Die-hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France (London: John Wiley, ), pp. –. One of the Camelots leaders claimed in defence that they only ever used the amount of violence that was ‘necessary’ and they had not ever killed anyone (see Maurice Pujo, Les Camelots du Roi [Paris: Flammarion, ], p. xviii).