During the 1980s, the ACTUAL association, formed by several former members of the last surrealist group gathered around André Breton (Jean Schuster, Gérard Legrand, Philippe Audoin), tried to open in Paris an “Ideal palace of Surrealism”, a center of documentation that would have made an inventory of surrealist archives scattered around the world. Firstly linked to the patrimonial library “Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet”, the aim of the project was to promote a collective vision of Surrealism, opened to a large public. Based on the archives of the association, this article shows how this project distinguished itself from the academic approach of Surrealism at a time when the speculation around surrealist art and archives became more and more important. Beyond the failure of the project, the study of the debates within and about ACTUAL presents the main contradictions of the patrimonialisation of a subversive movement such as Surrealism.