If the ghost of André Breton was floating around Sotheby's saleroom yesterday it would have enjoyed a laugh.

Far from witnessing the death of bourgeois values, the founder of Surrealism would have seen a collector spend 3.2 million euros (£2.5 million) for nine of his manuscripts, including the only original of the Manifesto with which he launched his revolutionary movement in 1924.

Art experts and historians had been upset because the 22-page Surrealist Manifesto was initially auctioned separately from eight other works, but Sotheby's immediately staged a second round of bidding for the whole lot.

It went to Gérard Lheritier, the founder of the privately-owned Paris Museum of Letters and Manuscripts.

The Manifesto is one of the seminal texts of the 20th century because a generation of writers and artists including Picasso, Miro, Magritte and Dali were inspired by its subversive, anti-bourgeois ideas.

In the Manifesto — written in a tight, careful hand — Breton adopted for his creed the word Surrealism that had been coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

His ideas were embraced with enthusiasm by devotees of the then fading Dada movement such as Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst and Man Ray.

The other main manuscript sold with it was Poisson Soluble (Soluble Fish), a poem in the “automatic writing” style that Breton pioneered.

The Manifesto was originally drafted as an introduction to the poem. It turned into the handbook for an artistic age devoted to the powers of the subconscious, abstraction and the absurd.

“Surrealism,” says the Manifesto, “is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought.”

Mr Lheritier, who is director of the Letters museum, said that private benefactors had made the purchase possible. “We had feared that the collection would be dismantled and sent abroad but we have managed to keep it together. I am thrilled that this collection will remain in France and be displayed in the same case.”

The subversive spirit of Dada and Surrealism made a return in the French student revolt of May 1968, currently the subject of a lavish 40th anniversary commemoration.

This was especially the case with some of the more bizarre poster slogans of that time, such as “It is forbidden to forbid” and “The beach is under the cobble stones”.

Breton would have been amused by the 1968 souvenirs now on sale, including a tin of “revolutionary tea” that is being sold by Fauchon, the most luxurious delicatessen in Paris. The Manifesto had its British followers too. Among the later ones was the Monty Python troupe of the 1970s.

The manuscripts were sold by the children of Simone Collinet, Breton's first wife, who died in 1980. Breton, who later wrote a Mexico City manifesto with Leon Trotsky, the exiled Soviet leader, died in France in 1966, aged 70.

The art of words

“Let us not mince words ... the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful” André Breton

“The ground beneath my feet is nothing but an enormous unfolded newspaper ...” Poisson Soluble

“If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them; first to capture them and later to submit them, should the occasion arise, to the control of reason” Surrealist Manifesto

“To be a surrealist ... means barring from your mind all remembrance of that you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been” Rene Magritte

“If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms” Antonin Artaud

Sources: www.artquotes.net

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