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Photography and surrealism

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What is a surrealist photograph?

that Germaine Berton had been part of a conspiracy and that now the death of his son was in some way connected with this ‘plan’. Supposedly, the murdered body of his son had been dumped in the taxi after the event and Daudet targeted the taxi driver who had been driving Philippe, calling him a liar in court. The taxi driver, ‘Bajot’, sued Léon Daudet for slander (the case was heard in November ). Daudet’s appearance in court turned into a farce when he began extolling his conspiracy theories and ranting anti-German mania. The taxi driver won and Daudet was sentenced to ve months in prison.

It also turned out that Philippe had shot himself in the taxi while in front of the prison where Germaine Berton was then awaiting trial. In a spate of conicting stories (later published as books on these events) various parties argued their different versions. One idea was that Philippe had already met Germaine Berton long before her crime and that they were lovers.74 This inspired theories that Philippe had, through his encounter with her, become an anarchist and had done so secretly to oppose his father, whom he anyway hated. By adopting the political views of his father’s opponents he could have his revenge. In this version Philippe had known that Germaine Berton initially wanted to murder his father and his act was in some way an imitation of hers, when he also declared an intention to murder a politician.75 Another theory was that Germaine Berton had been the mistress of Pierre Le Flaouter and that it was he who had ‘transformed her into a latter-day anarchist like Charlotte Corday’.76 Of course, it is to be noticed that these ‘theories’ introduce Berton’s sexuality into the equation, just as Philippe’s actions are linked to lial hatred. Such stories circulated, much as they do today in ‘tabloid’ forms, almost mythical as stories. Germaine Berton’s murder of Marius Plateau, her trial, the activities of L’Action Française, the death of Philippe Daudet followed by her own suicide, were in the realm of ‘public knowledge’. These popular stories are all clues as to the connotative interests of Berton’s ‘image’ in the surrealist montage – the connections between love and death, politics and sex, hatred and family relations.

There is another aspect to the photomontage added

Le Flaouter, Comment j’ai tué Philippe Daudet (Paris: Le Flaouter, ), p. .

Marcel Guitton and André Seguin, Du Scandale au meutre; La mort de Philippe Daudet (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, November ). Léon Daudet had once been a student of Charcot.

See Maurice Privat, L’Enigme Philippe Daudet (Paris-Neuilly: Les Documents Secrets, ), p. . (In Charlotte Corday had murdered Marat in the French Revolution [see Leslie Dick on ‘The Skull of Charlotte Corday’, in Berger and Richon (eds), Other than Itself ].)