He adhered to Dadaism and became one of the pillars of Surrealism by opening the way to artistic action politically committed to the Communist Party.

Éluard was born on 14 December 1895 in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, the son of Eugène Clément Grindel and wife Jeanne-Marie née Cousin.

At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis, interrupted his studies, and remained hospitalized until April 1914 in the Clavadel sanatorium near Davos.

[citation needed] In Clavadel, Éluard also met the Brazilian youngster Manuel Bandeira, who would become one of the foremost poets of the Portuguese language.

He suffered from migraine, bronchitis, cerebral anaemia, and chronic appendicitis and spent most of 1915 under treatment in a military hospital not far from home.

Éluard's mother came to visit him and he talked for hours about his beloved, opening his heart to her and slowly rallying her to his cause.

She wrote to his mother to befriend her and finally convinced her stepfather to let her go to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne.

In June 1916, Éluard was sent to Hargicourt to work in one of the military evacuation hospitals, 10 kilometers from the front line.

However, he announced to his parents and newlywed wife that when he returned to the front line, he would voluntarily join the "real soldiers" in the trenches.

On 11 May 1918, Gala gave birth to a baby girl who was eventually named Cécile (died 10 August 2016).

The three young poets Paulhan recommended to Éluard were André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon.

Wounded and scarred by the war,[clarification needed] the four poets found solace in their friendship and poetry.

They refused the bourgeois middle-class aspirations of money, respectability, and comfort and rejected its moral codes.

Underneath the charm, Ernst, like Éluard, was a man deeply revolted, in total rupture with society.

Unlike Éluard, however, Ernst remained indifferent to propagating this revolt which he considered to be an intimate "elegance".

He refused to challenge Gala, and spent his nights in clubs: the Zelli, the Cyrano, the Parrot, and Mitchell.

The night before, he had had a worrisome meeting with Louis Aragon, during which Éluard confessed that he wanted to put an end to a present that tortured him.

But Éluard wrote to Gala and four months later, she bought a ticket to go and find him and bring him back, locating him in Saigon.

Éluard supported the Moroccan Revolution, as early as 1925, and in January 1927, he joined the French Communist Party together with Aragon, Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Pierre Unik.

Éluard's poetry collection L'Évidence Poétique Habitude de la Poésie was translated into Arabic and published in the Egyptian magazine Al Tatawwur in 1940.

In 1934, Éluard married Nusch (Maria Benz), a music hall artist, whom he had met through his friends Man Ray and Pablo Picasso.

Thousands of copies of the twenty-one stanzas of his poem "Liberté", first published in the Choix revue, were parachuted from British aircraft over Occupied France.

In November 1943, Éluard found refuge in the mental asylum of Saint-Alban, headed by doctor Lucien Bonnafé, in which many resistants and Jews were hiding.

Two friends, Alain and Jacqueline Trutat (for whom Éluard wrote Corps mémorable), gave him back the will to live.

He was a member of the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław in April 1948, which persuaded Pablo Picasso to also join.

The following year, in April, he was a delegate to the Council for World Peace, at the conference held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

The same year, Éluard published Le Phénix (The Phoenix), a collection of poems dedicated to his reborn happiness.

[9] Paul Éluard died from a heart attack on 18 November 1952 at his home, 52 avenue de Gravelle, in Charenton-le-Pont.