Pierre Naville (French:[navil]; 1 February 1904 – 24 April 1993) was a FrenchSurrealist writer andsociologist.[1] He was a prominent member of the "Investigating Sex" group of Surrealist thinkers.
In politics, he was aCommunist and then aTrotskyist, before joining thePSU. He led a career as an occupational sociologist.
He was born and died in Paris.
Naville was born in 1904 to a family of Swiss Protestant bankers.
In 1922 he founded the avant-garde periodicalL'œuf dur (The Tough Egg) together withPhilippe Soupault,François Gérard,Max Jacob,Louis Aragon andBlaise Cendrars.[2]
He was co-editor withBenjamin Péret for the three first numbers ofLa Révolution Surréaliste, founded the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes in (1924 and participated in surrealist activities withAndré Breton before eventually opposing Surrealism because of his political divergences from the emerging Surrealist orthodoxy.
In 1926, Naville married fellow surrealistDenise Lévy.[3] That year he joined theFrench Communist Party (PCF), for which he managed the publicationClarté. He was a member of a delegation that visitedLeon Trotsky in Moscow in 1927. He returned convinced by Trotsky's arguments and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 fordeviationism. From this point onwards, he and his wife participated in the life of theFrench 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 aMarxist left, devoid of Communist and Trotskyist trappings, through a publication called theRevue Internationale.[citation needed]
Initially passing through the PSU, Naville continued to search for a modern left in the PSG, then the UGS, before taking part in the re-establishment of the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) under theFifth Republic. He remained loyal to this party in spite of his opposition to the "realists" (Gilles Martinet,Michel Rocard) and showed total rejection ofFrançois Mitterrand.[citation needed]
Appointed director of research at theCNRS in 1947, he worked withGeorges Friedmann at the Centre d'études sociologiques, dedicating his work to the psychosociology of work, and the study ofautomation,industrial society, the psychology of comportment, and the strategists and theoreticians of war, notablyCarl von Clausewitz. He supervised the French translation and publication of the complete works of Clausewitz.[citation needed]
He was the primary other contributor mentioned at the end ofJean-Paul Sartre'sL'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), criticisingexistentialism.[citation needed]
The laboratory of research in social sciences and management at theUniversity of Évry Val d'Essonne bears his name.[citation needed]
