1. The Attack of the Two Hundred Families This essay takes as its point of departure the invitation to the January 21, 1936, meeting of Contre-Attaque, the group founded by Georges Bataille and Andre Breton in 1935 as a reaction to the rise of fascism in France. Contre-Attaque not only marked a brief moment of detente between the two writers after their acrimonious split several years prior; it also represented surrealism's revolutionary attempt at participating in the mass political movements of the interwar era. For the intellectuals who participated in Contre-Attaque, the group was intended as precisely that: a counterattack, a movement that would remain on the offensive against the Right, appropriating fascism's tools in order to use them against it. In formulating its response to fascism, Contre-Attaque broke with other existing movements on the left, deeming the Popular Front's uniting of socialists, communists, and radicals as too "defensive" and thoroughly rejecting the Communist International's insistence that intellectuals abide by a set aesthetic program preapproved by the Soviet Union. Within eight months of the group's founding, amid political tumult and interpersonal disagreements, it had disbanded, thereby representing just a brief chapter in the political history of the avant-garde. (1) The January 21 card displays a simple drawing of a severed calf's head on a platter, over which is superimposed the necessary information--time, date, and location--for the session, at which Bataille, Breton, and Maurice Heine were scheduled to speak (Figure l). (2) The announcement reminds its bearer of the symbolic value of the meeting's date: "21 janvier 1793-21 janvier 1936. Anniversaire de l'execution capitale de Louis XVI." The interplay between text and image here comes to the fore: the calf's head on the platter recalls the decapitation of the French monarch, a visual commemoration of the moment when France became a people without a leader. As Simon Baker has suggested, this invitation--the only one produced in the context of Contre-Attaque--ought to be understood as a visual corollary to Bataille's writings on crowds from the 1930s (314). In essays like "La Structure psychologique du fascisme" (1933) and "Front populaire dans la rue" (1935), Bataille cautioned the Left against reproducing the model of domination and subservience that fascism enacted through its charismatic leader. Rather than channel the people's energy into outmoded political parties, Contre-Attaque insisted on the creation of mass political manifestations, headless crowds capable of moving swaths of individuals without offering up a new leader in the place of the fascist one. It was the hope, in Baker's formulation, of "the ability and potential of a leaderless fraternity to effect radical political action" (326). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The double reminder inscribed on the Contre-Attaque announcement of the severing of a people from its leader finds even deeper resonance when one considers the proposed topic for the January 21 meeting: "LES 200 FAMILLES qui relevent de la justice du peuple." "Les deux cents families" were a widespread--if today somewhat forgotten--myth of the interwar era: two hundred families who controlled France from behind the scenes, two hundred families whose decisions determined the nation's fate. Appearing in regular editorials in the popular press across the political spectrum, the two hundred families represented a conspiratorial view of French history, the idea that certain select interests, embodied by real people, held the fate of an entire nation in their hands. Articles attacking the Rothschild and Mallet banking families, the steel magnate Wendels, and the industrialist Schneiders (to name just a few of the most commonly cited families) were a commonplace in interwar political discourse; the two hundred families were routinely accused of everything from corruption and price-fixing to warmongering and profiteering. …