Le soleil naît derrière le Louvre : Malet, Surrealism, and the Modern Explosion of Paris

Abstract

Nationalistic discourse around the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa set up a tension between conservation and anarchy that would affect debates about the revolutionary, even destructive, potential of surrealist art. Léo Malet’s detective stories of the 1950s seem to swerve away from the author’s earlier surrealist engagement, but actually extend a critique of the conservative (in both senses) spirit that the Louvre had come to represent. This essay reads the first story of Malet’s Nouveaux mystères de Paris , in which art theft in the Louvre quartier results in a bomb-like dispersal of bodies, paintings, and wealth, as an allegory of the mid-twentieth century shift from urban consolidation to an age of entropic globalism and unanchored capitalism.