Salvador Dalí's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and Communism, though his writings tell anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement.[citation needed]
As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of the Trotskyist writer André Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning on his politics. In his 1970 book Dalí by Dalí, Dalí declared himself to be both an anarchist and monarchist.[citation needed]
With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Dalí fled from the fighting and refused to align himself with any group. He did the same during World War II (1939–1945), for which he was heavily criticized; George Orwell accused him of "scuttling off like a rat as soon as France is in danger" after Dalí had prospered in France during the pre-war years. "When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near", Orwell observed.[96] In a notable 1944 review of Dalí's autobiography, Orwell wrote, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being"