Pierre Naville

Pierre Naville (1903 – 23 April 1993) was a French Surrealist writer and sociologist. He was a prominent member of the "Investigating Sex" group of Surrealist thinkers.

In politics, he was a Communist and then a Trotskyist, before joining the PSU. He led a career as an occupational sociologist.

Naville was born in 1903 in Paris, to a family of Swiss Protestant bankers.

In 1922 he founded the avant-garde periodical L'œuf dur (The Tough Egg) together with Philippe Soupault, François Gérard, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon and Blaise Cendrars.

He was co-editor with Benjamin Péret for the three first numbers of La Révolution Surréaliste, founded the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes (1924) and participated in surrealist activities with André Breton before eventually opposing Surrealism because of his political divergences from the emerging Surrealist orthodoxy.

In 1926, Naville joined the French Communist Party (PCF), for which he managed the publication Clarté. He was part of a delegation which visited Leon Trotsky in Moscow in 1927. He returned convinced by Trotsky's arguments and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 for deviationism. From this point onwards he participated in the life of the French Trotskyist extreme left and notably its publications. However, he became less and less convinced by Trotsky's position and broke with the group in 1939. He then organised attempts to create a Marxist left, devoid of Communist and Trotskyist trappings, whose publication was called Revue Internationale.

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