Michel Carrouges

Michel Carrouges was the pen name of Louis Joseph Couturier (22 February 1910 – 13 June 1988), a French writer, literary critic, biographer and jurist. His work occupied an unusual position between Surrealism, Christian thought, the study of modern mythology and speculative literature. He is best known for André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme (1950), an early systematic study of the thought of André Breton, and for Les Machines célibataires (1954), which established the “bachelor machine” as a comparative category in modern literature and art.^[1][2]

Carrouges had been interested in Breton and Surrealism since the late 1920s. Before the Second World War he published on automatic writing, joined the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art and participated in the final phase of Acéphale, the secret society directed by Georges Bataille. Around 1949–1950, Breton invited him to attend the meetings of the Paris Surrealist group. His attempt to interpret Surrealism through Christian and esoteric categories nevertheless generated a serious internal dispute, culminating in the Carrouges–Pastoureau affair of 1951.^[3][4][5]

In addition to his writings on Breton and the visual arts, Carrouges published studies of Franz Kafka, biographies of Charles de Foucauld and other Catholic figures, two novels, essays on science fiction and an investigation of the postwar flying-saucer phenomenon. His papers, preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, reflect his recurring interest in the relationship between modern myth, technological imagery and mystical experience.^[6]

Life and work

Early life and intellectual formation

Carrouges was born in Poitiers and spent his childhood and adolescence there. After completing his secondary education, he studied law at the University of Poitiers, continuing a family tradition: his father was a lawyer and president of the local bar, while his grandfather had presided over a court. After moving to Paris in the early 1930s, he worked for more than a decade as a jurist for the insurance company La Providence.^[7]

He submitted some of his first poems to the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who encouraged him to continue writing. Through Jean Maury, a bookseller in Poitiers, Carrouges later established contact with Breton.^[8] His interest in Breton was already longstanding. In a 1948 letter, Carrouges described Breton as having been his intellectual guide for approximately twenty years, dating his admiration to the period immediately following the publication of Nadja in 1928.^[9]

Carrouges initially remained at a distance from the organised Surrealist group. He later recalled that during the 1930s he had followed the movement with a combination of admiration and apprehension, observing its internal conflicts and repeated expulsions without seeking membership. Nevertheless, he contributed “L’Écriture automatique” to the first issue of Cahiers G.L.M. in May 1936. The issue also included work by Gisèle Prassinos, Valentine Penrose and Hans Bellmer. In January 1939 he was listed as a supporter of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, the organisation founded following the collaboration of Breton, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky.^[9]

Acéphale and Georges Bataille

In 1939, while still publishing under the name Louis Couturier, Carrouges became associated with Bataille’s secret society Acéphale. Three letters from Bataille discovered in the Carrouges papers establish that he held the preliminary status of a “participant”. Within Acéphale this was distinct from full initiation into its successive grades, but required an obligation of secrecy, unanimous acceptance by existing adherents and attendance at an initial nocturnal meeting.^[10]

On 17 May 1939, Bataille sent Carrouges detailed instructions for a meeting near Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche. He was to take an evening train from the Gare Saint-Lazare, follow a guide at a distance and proceed alone to a forest clearing. There he would find a sulphur fire burning before an ancient oak that had been struck by lightning. He was forbidden to speak to or acknowledge any of those present. The tree, volcanic sulphur and fire were associated in Acéphale’s ritual language with Bataille’s idea of “joy before death”.^[11]

Further letters, written as Europe approached war, discussed the maintenance of the community’s bonds and the relationship Bataille perceived between mystical experience, eroticism, destruction and ecstasy. The last letter was dated 10 November 1939, several weeks after Bataille had formally dissolved the society. Carrouges later reworked memories of Acéphale’s nocturnal forest ritual in “L’Appareil à sous”, the opening chapter of his novel Les Portes dauphines.^[12]

Carrouges remained in contact with Bataille after the Second World War. Bataille encouraged him to write for the journal Critique, in which Carrouges published “Le Paysage en ébullition”, an essay on Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, in August–September 1951.^[13]

Wartime writing

During the German occupation of France, Carrouges began publishing regularly in literary and Catholic periodicals. “La Tragédie du surréalisme”, written in January 1941 and published in the Dominican review Rencontres that November, offered an early assessment of the movement’s development between 1920 and 1940. At that stage Carrouges pronounced historical Surrealism dead and, when faced with what he presented as a choice between poetry and the absolute, declared himself for the latter.^[14]

On 12 February 1942, Raymond Queneau introduced Carrouges to Jean Lescure, the editor of the Resistance literary journal Messages. Carrouges subsequently contributed three essays to it. “Le Silence et l’action”, written in December 1940 and published in 1942, was a contemplative discussion of silence, action and mystical experience. “La Face noire de la poésie” examined black humour, poetic madness and the deliberate derangement of the senses. His final contribution, published in 1943, was devoted to Paul Éluard.^[14]

Carrouges’s first book, Éluard et Claudel, appeared in 1945. It compared the poetic cosmologies of Éluard and Paul Claudel, two poets apparently separated by political, religious and aesthetic commitments. Carrouges organised the comparison around the idea of transfiguration, finding intimations of suffering in Éluard’s luminous universe and of possible triumph within Claudel’s tragic Christian cosmology.^[15]

In November 1945, Carrouges published “Le Passé et l’avenir du surréalisme” in the Dominican periodical La Vie intellectuelle. Contrary to the conclusion of his 1941 essay, he now predicted that Surrealism would be reborn in a more powerful form. He opposed it to contemporary existentialism, arguing that the Surrealist rejection of conventional logic sought not final absurdity but a higher order of meaning and a more comprehensive relation between consciousness and the world.^[16]

Surrealism, religion and esotericism

Carrouges’s engagement with Surrealism developed alongside dissatisfaction with contemporary Catholic culture. He criticised many Catholic writers for dwelling nostalgically on an idealised former Christendom and for failing to confront modern experience. Surrealism attracted him because its exploration of desire, dreams, revolt and poetic knowledge appeared to offer forms of experience largely absent from contemporary Christian writing.^[17]

In November 1947, Carrouges published “Surréalisme et occultisme” in the Cahiers d’Hermès. Breton publicly praised the essay in an interview the following year, considering it an effective answer to claims that his increasing interest in esotericism represented an abandonment of his earlier thought.^[18] Carrouges’s La Mystique du surhomme, published by Gallimard in 1948, examined what he regarded as a Promethean current in modern literature, extending from Romanticism through Friedrich Nietzsche to Surrealism. According to Carrouges, the decline of belief in God had encouraged the modern poet to assume the functions of prophet, explorer of hidden reality and herald of a transformed humanity.^[19]

Carrouges’s most important book on the movement, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme, appeared in 1950. Tessel Bauduin has described it as the first French book-length study to argue systematically that Breton and his Surrealism had made a substantial investment in esotericism. Carrouges treated hermeticism as a foundation of Breton’s thought and discussed the Zohar, Christian Kabbalah, Paracelsus, alchemy and Rosicrucianism, as well as Christian ideas of the Fall, grace and redemption.^[2]

Carrouges interpreted Breton’s “supreme point”, at which apparently irreconcilable opposites cease to be perceived as contradictory, through the language of Christian and Jewish esotericism. He also discussed Breton’s “Great Transparents”, the recurrence of ghosts and wandering spirits in Surrealist literature, and the movement’s use of such words as grace, salvation and revelation. Carrouges considered these phenomena analogous to religious experience without claiming that Breton had consciously accepted Christianity.^[20]

His objective was partly apologetic but also critical of the Church. Carrouges believed that the prophetic force of Surrealist poetry might awaken Christians whose religious practice had become conventional or superficial. In his later formulation, when a prophetic voice could no longer be heard within the Church, a summons to spiritual renewal might come from outside it.^[21]

Bauduin regards Carrouges’s study as both pioneering and problematic. His personal access to Breton and the postwar group gave him insight into subjects that had become increasingly important to them, but his selection and classification of esoteric traditions were shaped by his Catholic convictions. His treatment of magic as morally suspect and his translation of Surrealist ideas into a Christian metaphysical framework made the book controversial among Surrealists and later scholars. Nevertheless, the work became a classic in the specialised study of Surrealism and esotericism, and the critic Roger Shattuck counted Carrouges among the most perceptive early French commentators on the movement.^[2]

An English translation by Maura Prendergast, titled André Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1974.

The Surrealist group

Breton invited Carrouges to attend the meetings of the Paris Surrealist group around 1949–1950, following the completion of his book. His formal association with the group lasted for approximately a year. Meetings were held in cafés around the Place Blanche, where members discussed publications, organised collective activities and participated in Surrealist games.^[22][23]

Carrouges contributed “Signal d’alerte”, an essay on Kafka, to the Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle, published as a special issue of La Nef in March–April 1950. He also published “Le Cœur surréaliste” in the 1950 volume of Études carmélitaines devoted to the symbolism of the heart. His distribution of offprints from this Catholic journal at a Surrealist meeting was interpreted by some members as a deliberate provocation.^[24]

In the autumn of 1950, Carrouges travelled to the Hoggar Mountains in connection with preparations for the proposed transfer of Charles de Foucauld’s remains. In a letter to Breton dated 1 December, he compared the desert landscape to the paintings of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico.^[25]

Carrouges–Pastoureau affair

Carrouges’s acceptance by Breton had already exposed disagreements within the group over religion. In 1948, a tract principally drafted by Henri Pastoureau, À la niche les glapisseurs de Dieu, had warned Catholic intellectuals against appropriating Surrealist revolt for religious apologetics. Signed by 52 people, it reaffirmed the movement’s atheism and identified Carrouges as one of the writers whose approach risked subordinating Surrealism to Christianity. The tract did not, however, accuse him of falsifying Surrealist texts.^[18]

The conflict became acute when Carrouges agreed to lecture on Surrealism at the Centre catholique des intellectuels français on 12 February 1951. Several younger members of the Surrealist group attended with the intention of disrupting the event. They attempted to read a declaration and repeatedly interrupted Carrouges. The subsequent dispute was not simply over Carrouges’s personal Catholicism: it concerned whether Surrealist ideas could be presented within a Catholic institution, whether Breton had compromised the movement’s anti-religious principles by supporting him, and the extent of Breton’s authority over the group.^[23][5]

The crisis culminated at a meeting on 19 March 1951 at the Café de la Place Blanche. Breton expelled Pastoureau but simultaneously disassociated the movement from Carrouges and ended their public collaboration. The controversy prompted departures and internal realignments and became one of the most serious crises experienced by the postwar Paris group.^[26][5]

The separation was not a permanent personal rupture. Carrouges and Pastoureau continued their polemic in print into 1952, but Carrouges’s correspondence with Breton also resumed. In October 1952, Carrouges wrote of the cordiality of their relations and again described Breton as a friend whose work he had followed since Nadja.^[9][27]

Catholic and social writing

During and after his involvement with Breton’s circle, Carrouges worked in Catholic publishing. He was associated with the Dominican journal La Vie intellectuelle and became editor-in-chief of Fêtes et Saisons, published by Éditions du Cerf.^[7] His religious writings included studies of the priest Lucien Bunel, known as Père Jacques, the Curé of Ars John Vianney, the role of laypeople in the Catholic Church and the social responsibilities of employers.

He devoted a substantial part of his work to Charles de Foucauld. Charles de Foucauld: explorateur mystique appeared in 1954 and was followed by Foucauld devant l’Afrique du Nord and Le Père de Foucauld et les fraternités aujourd’hui. Carrouges compared Foucauld’s itinerant life with that of the poet Germain Nouveau, who was admired by Breton. He also interpreted Foucauld in relation to the contemporary political transformation of North Africa, emphasising his life among the Tuareg and his early expectation that the states of the Maghreb would eventually become politically independent.^[28]

In Le Laïcat: mythe et réalité (1964), Carrouges criticised the distance between the institutional Church and ordinary laypeople. The book also returned to his complaint that much modern Catholic literature remained preoccupied with restoring an idealised past instead of confronting the social and intellectual conditions of the present.^[17]

Kafka and the bachelor machines

Carrouges published his first book on Kafka in 1948 and returned to the writer in Kafka contre Kafka in 1962. He interpreted Kafka’s apparently absurd worlds as representations of concrete structures of social alienation and institutional power. His interest centred particularly on trials, bureaucracies and machines whose operating principles remain inaccessible to the people subjected to them.

These concerns became part of Les Machines célibataires, first published by Éditions Arcanes in 1954. Carrouges used Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly called The Large Glass, as a guide to a recurrent configuration in modern literature and art. He compared imaginary mechanisms in works by Duchamp, Kafka, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Edgar Allan Poe, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and other writers.^[29]

For Carrouges, the bachelor machine was not merely a fictional piece of technology. It was a modern myth of erotic isolation: a self-contained mechanism in which desire is converted into repetition, frustration, punishment or death. Such machines often separated male and female domains, transformed persons into mechanical components, or produced hybrid beings that were partly human and partly artificial. Carrouges associated them with a modern condition in which the other person was reduced from a subject of love to an object of erotic possession.^[30]

The concept acquired an intellectual history independent of Carrouges’s book. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to his comparative collection of bachelor machines in Anti-Oedipus, while later critics and artists applied the category to cybernetics, gender, bodily technology and mechanised desire.^[31]

A revised and substantially expanded edition of Les Machines célibataires appeared in 1976. It added discussions of Jules Verne’s The Carpathian Castle, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel and Lautréamont, together with correspondence from Duchamp. The new edition coincided with the Paris presentation of Harald Szeemann’s travelling exhibition Les Machines célibataires at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, from 29 April to 5 July 1976. Carrouges contributed to the exhibition project and its catalogue.^[32][33]

Fiction, science fiction and modern myth

Carrouges published two novels. Les Portes dauphines appeared in 1954. Its opening chapter transformed his memory of Acéphale’s forest meeting into a fictional nocturnal initiation, illustrating the persistence of Bataille’s secret society in his literary imagination.^[34]

Les Grands-Pères prodiges, published in 1957, was an anticipatory novel set in Algeria in 2015. In the novel, the physician Youssef Lamrani discovers alchemical manuscripts at Uppsala containing the secret of an elixir of youth. He constructs a cylindrical apparatus capable of physically rejuvenating elderly people. The treatment gives rise to erotic and familial complications, but also to religious, metaphysical and political conflict. As access to the cylinders remains restricted, society divides into a privileged minority of rejuvenated people and an ageing majority still subject to death. The novel ends amid signs of social revolt.^[35]

Carrouges also participated in the French reception of Anglo-American science fiction during the 1950s. Gavin Parkinson identifies him as an important fringe figure in postwar Surrealism who used Breton’s theories of the Gothic novel and collective myth to interpret writers such as Ray Bradbury. Rather than treating science fiction principally as technical prediction, Carrouges approached stories of parallel worlds, temporal dislocation, imaginary machines and extraterrestrial beings as expressions of contemporary mythology.^[36]

This approach culminated in Les Apparitions de Martiens (1963), an investigation of reports of flying saucers and extraterrestrial encounters. Carrouges compared witness accounts, recurring narrative patterns and apparent contradictions while attempting to distinguish observation from cultural elaboration. He considered the flying saucer a major modern myth, but did not rule out the possibility that some reports might ultimately relate to an unknown physical phenomenon or that contact with extraterrestrial life might occur in the future.^[27][36]

Later years and death

The onset of blindness eventually curtailed Carrouges’s regular literary activity, although he continued to publish occasionally.^[7] One of his last essays, “Machines: pataphysique de l’au-delà”, appeared in Études philosophiques in 1985. In 1986 he collaborated with the Dominican theologian Bernard Bro on a biography of John Vianney.

Carrouges died on 13 June 1988 at his home on the Avenue de La Motte-Picquet in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. He was 78.^[37]

Reception and archives

Carrouges occupies an ambiguous place in the historiography of Surrealism. His Catholic interpretation led some members and scholars to regard him as an outsider attempting to appropriate the movement for religious purposes. His closeness to Breton during the decisive postwar period nevertheless made him one of the earliest critics to recognise the importance of hermeticism, alchemy and esoteric historiography in Breton’s later thought. Bauduin therefore treats his work as a foundational but confessionally shaped contribution to the study of Surrealism and Western esotericism.^[2]

His theory of bachelor machines has had a wider and more durable reception. It supplied a shared category for works that had previously been studied separately and influenced later discussions of Duchamp, Kafka, modern technology, eroticism and the relationship between bodies and machines. The exhibitions organised by Szeemann and others during the 1970s extended the term from literary criticism into art history and curatorial practice.^[31]

Carrouges’s children donated his papers to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2011, and the library subsequently acquired additional correspondence. The archive includes manuscripts, correspondence and extensive research files concerning Breton, Bataille, Duchamp, Kafka, Jarry and the bachelor machines. It also contains a substantial collection of witness statements, press material and documentation concerning flying saucers and the history of ufology.^[6]

Copies of seven documents representing different sides of the Carrouges–Pastoureau affair are held by the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. They include statements, letters and records associated with Carrouges, Pastoureau, Breton, Benjamin Péret, Maurice Henry and Patrick Waldberg.^[26]

Selected works

Surrealism and literary criticism

• “L’Écriture automatique”, Cahiers G.L.M., no. 1, May 1936, pp. 31–39.
• “La Tragédie du surréalisme”, Rencontres, November 1941, pp. 104–120.
• “Le Silence et l’action”, Messages, no. 6, 1942.
• “La Face noire de la poésie”, Messages, no. 2, 1942, pp. 44–54.
• “Paul Éluard ou l’homme miroir et soleil du vide”, Messages, no. 7, 1943, pp. 427–431.
• Éluard et Claudel. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1945.
• “Le Passé et l’avenir du surréalisme”, La Vie intellectuelle, November 1945, pp. 125–135.
• “Surréalisme et occultisme”, Cahiers d’Hermès, 1947.
• La Mystique du surhomme. Paris: Gallimard, 1948; reissued 1967.
• Franz Kafka. Paris: Éditions Labergerie, 1948.
• André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1950; reissued 1967. English translation: André Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism, translated by Maura Prendergast. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1974. ISBN 978-0-8173-7316-0.
• “Signal d’alerte”, in Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle, La Nef, nos. 63–64, March–April 1950.
• “Le Cœur surréaliste”, Études carmélitaines, 1950.
• “Le Paysage en ébullition”, Critique, August–September 1951.
• “Pastoureau enterre le phénix”, Monde nouveau-Paru, no. 55, 1952.
• Les Machines célibataires. Paris: Arcanes, 1954; revised and expanded edition, Paris: Le Chêne, 1976.
• Kafka contre Kafka. Paris: Plon, 1962.
• “Machines: pataphysique de l’au-delà”, Études philosophiques, 1985.

Fiction and speculative writing

• Les Portes dauphines. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.
• Les Grands-Pères prodiges. Paris: Plon, 1957.
• Les Apparitions de Martiens. Paris: Fayard, 1963.

Religious and social writing

• Le Monde se fait tous les jours. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1953.
• Charles de Foucauld: explorateur mystique. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1954.
• Le Père Jacques. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1958.
• Foucauld devant l’Afrique du Nord: essai critique. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1961.
• Le Père de Foucauld et les fraternités aujourd’hui. Paris: Éditions du Centurion, 1963.
• Le Laïcat: mythe et réalité, preface by Jean Daniélou. Paris: Éditions du Centurion, 1964.
• Un patronat de droit divin. Paris: Anthropos, 1971.
• Jean-Marie Vianney, curé d’Ars, with Bernard Bro. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986.

Introductions and prefaces

• Thomas à Kempis, L’Imitation de Jésus-Christ, French translation by Félicité de Lamennais, introduction by Michel Carrouges. Paris: Club français du livre, 1950.
• Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, afterword by Michel Carrouges. Paris: Club français du livre, 1952.
• Pierre Van der Meer de Walcheren, La Vérité vous rendra libres, translated from Dutch by Antoine Freund, preface by Michel Carrouges. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1971.