Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard was the pen name of Eugène Émile Paul Grindel, born on 14 December 1895 in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, and died on 18 November 1952. He was a French poet, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and a writer whose life was marked by illness, war, love, revolt, and political commitment. In 1916, he chose the name Paul Éluard, a matronymic borrowed from his maternal grandmother. He first adhered to Dadaism, then became one of the pillars of Surrealism, helping open a path toward artistic action committed to the Communist Party.

Éluard grew up in a modest family: his father, Eugène Clément Grindel, was an accountant when Paul was born and soon opened a real-estate agency; his mother, Jeanne-Marie Cousin, was a seamstress. Around 1908 the family moved to Paris, rue Louis Blanc. He attended school in Aulnay-sous-Bois and won a scholarship to the École Supérieure de Colbert. At sixteen, tuberculosis interrupted his studies and sent him to the Clavadel sanatorium near Davos until April 1914. There he met Helena Diakonova, whom he nicknamed Gala. She believed he would become a great poet, listened to his verses, judged them honestly, and gave him the confidence to write. At Clavadel he was also inspired by Walt Whitman and became friends with Manuel Bandeira, later one of the foremost poets of the Portuguese language.

The First World War shaped Éluard sharply. After he and Gala were declared healthy in April 1914, they were separated, she to Moscow and he to Paris. He was mobilised, but his poor health placed him in auxiliary service. In 1916 he worked in a military evacuation hospital near the front line at Hargicourt, writing more than 150 letters a day to the families of the dead and wounded, and digging graves at night. Shaken by the war, he began writing verse again. He married Gala on 20 February 1917, then left for the front line two days later. Severe conditions damaged his health, and in March 1917 he was sent to a military hospital with incipient pleurisy. Their daughter, Cécile, was born on 11 May 1918.

In 1919, as the war was ending, Éluard published Duty and Anxiety and Little Poems for Peace. With Gala’s help, he sent his poems to figures in the literary world who had taken a stand against the war. Jean Paulhan answered with admiration and directed him to André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, three young poets behind the journal Littérature. Éluard met them in March 1919, still in uniform, shy and blushing. They liked his work and chose to publish one of his texts. Wounded by war and distrustful of money, respectability, comfort, politicians, the military, and ambitions of power, the four poets found friendship and poetry as a form of freedom. They were drawn to Dadaism, which had begun in Switzerland.

Éluard later became known worldwide as The Poet of Freedom. During the Second World War, he wrote several poems against Nazism that circulated clandestinely. He is considered the most gifted of the French surrealist poets, but the force of his work also comes from the life behind it: illness at sixteen, the faith Gala placed in him, the front line, the hospital, the dead and wounded, the revolt of the interwar years, and the choice to bind poetry to freedom. His words still speak because they were made under pressure, in moments when private feeling and public danger could not be kept apart.