mass migration of rural immigrants to urban areas, and the regimentation of large numbers of semi-skilled workers in factories.
Add to this mix the ideas of Karl Marx (social revolution), Charles Darwin (biological evolution), and Sigmund Freud (psychoanalysis) and it is no wonder that the unforeseen explosion of new intellectual and artistic movements that ensued would transform European culture forever. This historical shift is referred to as the birth of modernism, and it had profound implications for the arts, education, communications, and the sciences.
In this paper I will investigate currents of modernism starting with the writings of Nietzsche and Freud that eventually influenced Surrealism. At the end of the paper I will also discuss a rather bizarre French intellectual movement called the Society of Mutual Autopsy, which played an important role in the propagation of anti-clerical atheistic ideas, as well as performing a significant function in the birth of the social sciences û particularly anthropology.
Nietzsche, Freud, and the Surrealists were typical of other modernist thinkers and artists in critiquing both the scientific rationalism of the European inheritors of the Enlightenment and the magic thinking of the Christian religion. Nietzsche destroyed much of the time-honoured intellectual certainties of bourgeois society by denouncing Christianity, conventional morality, and rationalism (www.angelfire.com). His championing of the primacy of sense impressions over abstract intellectual concepts can be seen reflected first in the Impressionists, and later in cultu
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