Louis Aragon

gigatos | June 8, 2022

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Summary

Louis Aragon was a French poet, novelist and journalist, born probably on October 3, 1897 in Paris, where he died on December 24, 1982.

With André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, he is one of the leaders of Parisian Dadaism and Surrealism. After his break with surrealism in 1931, he became fully involved in the French Communist Party, which he had joined in 1927, and in the literary doctrine of socialist realism. The defeat of 1940 marks a turning point in his poetry, and Aragon then turns to a reinterpretation of the poetic and novelistic tradition.

From the late 1950s, many of his poems were set to music and sung by Léo Ferré or Jean Ferrat, helping to bring his poetic work to the attention of a wide audience.

With Elsa Triolet, he formed one of the emblematic couples of French literature of the twentieth century. Several collections of Aragon are dedicated to her, and his works often refer to the works of his companion.

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Childhood

The natural and adulterous son of Louis Andrieux, ex-prefect of the police of the city of Paris and now deputy of Forcalquier, a Freemason from the Protestant upper middle class, and Marguerite Toucas-Massillon, a young girl from the Catholic middle class who ran a boarding house on Avenue Carnot in Paris, Louis Aragon was born in a place that is not known for sure: most likely Paris (his mother giving birth at Place des Invalides as he recounts in Je n”ai jamais appris à écrire, or Les incipit), but perhaps Neuilly-sur-Seine, cited by some sources, or Toulon (the place where his pregnant mother retired to “hide this misfortune, me.”

The name “Aragon” would have been chosen by Louis Andrieux in memory of the Aragon, known when he was ambassador in Spain; but perhaps also Andrieux had this name in mind because, being prefect, he had under his orders the commissioner Aragon. In order to preserve the honor of the maternal family, which came from the Massillon family, and that of the prefect, the child is presented as the adopted son of his maternal grandmother Claire Toucas, the brother of his mother and the godson of his father. The work of Louis Aragon will carry in filigree the secret wound of not having been recognized by his father, thirty-three years older than his mother. He will evoke what was the tragedy of his life, a secret shared with his mother who perhaps made him the fatherhood and the transmission of a name difficult to consider, in a set of three poems entitled Domaine Privé.

Louis Aragon studied around 1907 at the Saint-Pierre school in Neuilly-sur-Seine where he rubbed shoulders with Henry de Montherlant and the brothers Jacques and Pierre Prévert, then continued his studies at the Lycée Carnot.

He was in his second year of medicine with André Breton at the “Fourth Fever” of Val-de-Grâce, the district for the insane, where the two carabinieri were linked to Philippe Soupault, when he was mobilized as a stretcher bearer, then as an auxiliary doctor. It was on this occasion that Marguerite Toucas revealed to him the secret of his birth that he sensed. He was mobilized in 1917 and joined the front in the spring of 1918 as an auxiliary doctor.

At the front, he experienced wounded flesh, the extreme violence of the First World War, a horror from which one never quite returns but which will constantly reappear in his work and which is at the origin of his future commitment to peace. He received the war cross and remained mobilized until June 1919 in the occupied Rhineland, an episode that inspired him to write the famous poem Bierstube Magie allemande.

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Literary debut in Dada and Surrealist circles

In 1920, Aragon published his collection Feu de joie at the publishing house Au sans pareil, founded by René Hilsum, where André Breton and Philippe Soupault also published. He writes regularly in the magazine Littérature founded by Breton and edited by Hilsum. In 1921, the NRF published Anicet ou le Panorama, a novel begun in the trenches.

In the dandy Paris of the post-war period, he befriended Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, for whom he left an American designer, Eyre de Lanux. He consoles himself with Denise Lévy, who chooses to marry another of his friends, Pierre Naville, while starting to write Le Paysan de Paris. L”Œuf dur publishes some of his texts.

In 1922, he gave up the idea of becoming a doctor, founded with Breton and Soupault the magazine Littérature and published Les Aventures de Télémaque. Thanks to Breton, he found work with the fashion designer Jacques Doucet, a great collector of modern paintings, but also of manuscripts, in the purchase of which he advised him as secretary.

After illustrating Dadaism and experiencing automatic writing with Robert Desnos, to whom he would dedicate years later the moving Complainte de Robert le Diable sung by Jean Ferrat, he joined, in 1924, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault in the Surrealist movement and co-signed, on the occasion of the funeral of Anatole France, the scandalous Un cadavre, which invites to throw all past literature into the Seine. He devoured, as if to forget Denise Lévy, the works of Engels, Lenin, Proudhon, Schelling, Hegel and Freud.

In 1926, destitute, he signed a contract with Jacques Doucet by which the young novelist undertook to deliver his production to the collector on a monthly basis in exchange for a monthly income of one thousand francs. He writes a cycle of fifteen hundred pages, La Défense de l”infini. At the same time, he became the lover of the anarchist writer Nancy Cunard, who took him on a tour of Europe.

With Breton and after Éluard, he joined the French Communist Party in January 1927. In the summer, he published a violent protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in which he militated for a committed literature, Traité du style. In November, in a hotel on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Nancy rescued a handful of copies of The Defense of the Infinite that the poet, in a fit of rage, had thrown into the fire. This break, which is also a break with money, marks the beginning of a deep personal questioning of which the political commitment will be the result.

In April 1928, deprived of Doucet”s financial support, he published, but anonymously, Le Con d”Irène (Irene”s Con) which had been saved from the flames. The story was banned by the police and Aragon denied being the author before the examining magistrate. In Venice in September 1928, ruined by the failure of the work, he discovered Nancy”s affair with Henry Crowder and tried to commit suicide, an episode that gave rise to one of his most famous poems sung by Léo Ferré, Il n”aurait fallu.

Two months later, on November 6, he met Elsa Triolet, sister of Lili Brik – Vladimir Mayakovsky”s muse – at the brasserie La Coupole. Elsa “enters the poem” and will become his own muse for life, forming with the poet a mythical couple whose celebration, especially in Les Yeux d”Elsa, will mix from the forties ἔρως and commitment to a cause (the Resistance, communism, decolonization, feminism, literature, etc.)

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Break with surrealism and communist commitment

In 1929, the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR freezes, within the group of the surrealists, the quarrels of persons in ideological fractures. Aragon opposes in particular to a dictatorial Breton who rejects the novelistic form and who judges the poetry only suitable to express the unconscious.

In 1930, six months after Mayakovsky”s suicide, Aragon was sent with Georges Sadoul to the Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov to represent a surrealist movement accused of anarchism by the hard-line PCF. Aragon fell in line with this orthodox line and published Front rouge, a poem in the form of an ode to the USSR and to Marxism-Leninism, calling for various violent actions: “the splendid and chaotic heap that is easily produced with a church and dynamite – Try it and see”, also denouncing the surrealist aesthetics and the reformists with the cry of “Fire on Léon Blum”, which led to him being charged with a call to murder. The break with Breton, who, being a good sport, nevertheless defended him during the trial, was consummated. With Elsa, he left to live in the USSR for a year. He shows without question in several texts an approval of the terror organized by the Stalinist regime. The collections Persecuted persecutor (1931) and Hourra l”Oural (1934) fully reflect this commitment. The first contains Red Front and the second Vive le Guépéou. According to Lional Ray, these two collections are his least good.

He married Elsa on February 28, 1939. His poetry is largely inspired, since the 1940s, by his love for her (see Les Yeux d”Elsa).

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World War II

He was mobilized in September 1939 as an auxiliary doctor, first in the 220th regional workers” regiment in November 1939 before joining the 3rd light mechanical division and leaving for the Belgian border. He took part in the fighting of the French campaign in the spring of 1940, and was evacuated to England from Dunkirk, on board the torpedo boat La Flore of the La Melpomène class, before being landed in France, in Brest, from Plymouth, to resume the fight. He was taken prisoner by the Germans in Angoulême but managed to escape. The 1940 campaign earned him two commendations, the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre with palm, the latter for having gone several times to look for his wounded comrades through the enemy lines.

He is also, with Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Pierre Seghers, Jean Prévost, Jean-Pierre Rosnay and some others, among the poets who took resolutely side, during the Second World War, for the resistance against the Nazism; it is there the subject of another deep wound: the break with his friend Drieu la Rochelle, who, after having “hesitated between communism and fascism” (see: A woman at his window), turned to Nazism, a kind of suicide, which will push him to really give himself death after the Liberation. Drieu”s disillusioned novelistic self-portrait, Gilles, is partly answered by Aragon”s novel, Aurélien, which narrates the itinerary of a former combatant turned collaborator.

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The post-war period

He embarked on an epic novel, The Communists, which should evoke the heroism of the militants in the pre-war period and the Resistance, defending and justifying their attitude during the period of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. In the end, he wrote only about the period up to the Battle of France in 1940.

From 1953 to 1970, the couple Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet lived in the property Le Moulin de Villeneuve that Aragon gave to his wife.

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Last years

After the death of Elsa Triolet in 1970, Aragon displayed his sexual attraction to men, which Pierre Drieu la Rochelle had mentioned as early as the 1930s, notably in Gilles. The discovery or the ostentatious, albeit late, affirmation of Aragon”s attraction to men remains “without it being clearly established that it was bisexuality or homosexuality.

He died on December 24, 1982 at his home in the rue de Varenne, in the 7th arrondissement, watched over by his friend Jean Ristat, executor of Elsa and Louis” will. He is buried in the park of the Moulin de Villeneuve, in his property of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, next to Elsa.

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Dada and surrealism

The first collections of Aragon are part of the Dada movement and then Surrealism. The poems of Feu de joie (1920) are those of a youth in revolt. They express on the other hand an enthusiasm for modernity, in particular the American cinema, the Paris of the coffees and the subways. It seeks to re-poetize the everyday by starting from this daily. André Breton will say besides in 1924: “Aragon escapes more easily than whoever the small disaster of the daily newspaper”.

They leave little room for traditional versification but show an attachment to alliteration and assonance within the free verse. This last one begins to impose itself in the French literature, in particular thanks to the poem Zone which opens the collection Alcools of Guillaume Apollinaire, as well as The Prose of the Transsiberian and the small Jehanne de France of Blaise Cendrars.

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Poetry of communist commitment

The Surrealists turned to political action since 1925 and the opposition to the Rif War. This led to tensions within the group, notably with the exclusions of Antonin Artaud and Philippe Soupault during that year of 1926. Several surrealists, around Breton and Aragon, took their card to the French Communist Party; Aragon”s membership dates from January 1927. Their reception by the communist intellectuals was however rather mitigated, so that the surrealists ceased their collaboration with Clarté in 1928. The surrealists are also not in agreement between them on the analysis to give to the fate of Leon Trotsky. The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, published by André Breton in 1929, did not manage to overcome the literary and political quarrels between the members.

Aragon met Elsa Triolet on November 5, 1928, but the “Elsa cycle” was not composed until ten years later. Louis Aragon was therefore involved in the Communist Party before his meeting with his muse; at that time he had far fewer reservations than his companion about the activities of the PCF and the USSR.

Persecuted persecutor is published in 1931, and contains the poem Front rouge, which leads to the break of Aragon with surrealism. Three years later, the collection Hourra l”Oural takes an even more violent stand for communism, with the poem Vive le Guépéou. Lionel Ray judges that these two collections are “very weak or very mediocre, except for a few pages where the lyric extent takes its rights”.

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After 1940: the return to tradition

It is in Le Crève-cœur (1941) that Elsa Triolet appears for the first time in Aragon”s poetry. There was a poem for her in Persecuted Persecutor, and she was the dedicatee of several of his novels, but this is the first occurrence in Aragon of a lyricism with a face, which will be developed in the “cycle of Elsa” which begins immediately after this collection.

This collection marks the return of Louis Aragon to the alexandrine and to more traditional codes of poetry than in his collections of the Dada or Surrealist period. It begins a work of reappropriation of the tradition. This continues in his next collection, Les Yeux d”Elsa (1942), in which Aragon returns to a simplicity of images and rhythms, far from the provocations of his previous collections, to show the link between his personal lyricism and his poetic commitment.

Elsa Triolet is also the subject of the collections Cantique à Elsa (1941), Les Yeux et la Mémoire (1954), Elsa (1959) and Le Fou d”Elsa (1964), constituting the “Elsa cycle”.

After 1956, the de-Stalinization and the repression of the Budapest uprising, Aragon first returned to a more personal poetry, with his poetic autobiography The Unfinished Novel, then Elsa and The Fool of Elsa. According to Pierre Daix, this return to self and lyrical poetry is “a reconstruction of Aragon, his ideas on life, after the political disaster.

Dadaist and surrealist prose writer

The first novel published by Louis Aragon is Anicet ou le Panorama (1921). It is a staging of the group of French Dadaist friends, particularly André Breton, Philippe Soupault and himself. Aragon continues in the narrative genre with The Adventures of Telemachus (1922), a Dadaist parody of the novel of the same name written by Fenelon in the late seventeenth century. Le Paysan de Paris (1926), dedicated to the surrealist painter André Masson, is a series of musings on Parisian places.

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Socialist Realism

Aragon is in the vein of socialist realism from his break with surrealism in 1932. He wrote the cycle Le Monde réel, including Les Cloches de Bâle (1934), Les Beaux Quartiers (1936, Prix Renaudot), Les Voyageurs de l”impériale (1942), Aurélien (1944), Les Communistes (6 volumes), 1949-1951 and rewritten in 1966-1967.

Journalist

In 1933, Aragon worked at L”Humanité, in the news section. The same year, in July 1933, he was, with Paul Nizan, the editorial secretary of the review Commune, published by the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. The aim of this association was to bring together as widely as possible the world of culture in the fight against fascism and Nazism. From January 1937, Aragon was a member of the Commune”s steering committee, along with André Gide, Romain Rolland and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. The magazine announced itself as a “French literary magazine for the defense of culture. Gide withdrew in August 1937, Vaillant-Couturier died in the fall of 1937. Romain Rolland was no longer a young man, so Louis Aragon became the effective director. In December 1938, he welcomed a young writer, Jacques Decour, as editor-in-chief. Under the aegis of Aragon, Commune played a major role in mobilizing intellectuals to defend the Spanish Republic.

In March 1937, Aragon was called upon by his party to direct the new evening daily, Ce soir, which he launched. He shared the direction of the newspaper, which tried to compete with Paris-Soir, with the writer Jean-Richard Bloch. His activity is intense, because he carries out this task simultaneously with the writing of novels and his participation in Commune. Ce soir, banned in August 1939, was reborn at the Liberation. Aragon took over the direction with Jean-Richard Bloch, then alone, after the death of the latter in 1947. In 1949, Aragon was deprived of his civil rights.

Aragon, director of the literary weekly Les Lettres françaises, which originated in the Resistance and became the property of the Communist Party, became the owner of a newspaper now politically and financially autonomous in the days following the end of Ce soir. Supported by Pierre Daix, editor-in-chief, the newspaper leads from the 1960s an increasingly open fight against Stalinism and its aftermath in the Eastern bloc. It makes known writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera. When the magazine violently condemns the invasion of Prague by Soviet tanks in 1968, subscriptions from the USSR and Eastern countries are abruptly stopped. The magazine Les Lettres françaises, which had become loss-making, did not benefit from any financial compensation from the Communist Party and ceased publication in 1972, the year that marked the end of Aragon”s journalistic activities.

Publisher

Alongside his journalistic tasks, Louis Aragon had a means of making writers known. He was indeed the president and general manager of a publishing house belonging to the communist editorial orbit, the Éditeurs français réunis (EFR). Heir to two publishing houses founded in the Resistance, La Bibliothèque française and Hier et Aujourd”hui, the EFR, which he directed with François Monod and then from 1961 with Madeleine Braun, published in the 1950s French writers commonly attached to the current of “socialist realism. It was at the EFR that Premier Choc was published, the novel that earned André Stil, the future Goncourt academician, the 1953 Stalin Prize. They publish Soviet “socialist realist” writers.

But their role is not limited to the dissemination of these works. They make known the writings of Czechs like Julius Fučík or Vítězslav Nezval, the poems of Rafael Alberti, Yánnis Rítsos or the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky.

From the beginning of the 1960s, they made it possible to get acquainted with non-Russian Soviet literature, such as the novels of the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, which he co-translated with A. Dimitrieva, but also the Russian works of the post-Stalinist “thaw”: Galina Nicolaëva”s The Engineer Bakhirev, published in 1960, and Anatoli Kouznetsov”s Babi Iar, published in 1967. Similarly, in 1964, the EFR published the first novel by the East German writer Christa Wolf, The Shared Sky.

Aragon also published at the Liberation, with a preface by Vercors, Deux voies françaises Péguy-Péri (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1944).

Commitments

He joined several writer friends (René Char, André Breton, Paul Éluard, etc.) to attack head-on the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, which they described as a “carnival of skeletons” intended to “give the citizens of the metropolis the awareness of ownership that they will need to hear without flinching the echo of the shootings. They demanded “the immediate evacuation of the colonies” and the holding of a trial for the “crimes committed”.

Among his friends of the 1920s, who joined the Communist movement after him in 1927, he was the only one to become involved with the PCF on a long-term basis: André Breton and Paul Éluard left him in the early 1930s (Paul Éluard joined him again, through Aragon, later during the years of the Resistance). Back from the USSR in 1931, he published Front rouge, a militant and provocative poem of which he would say much later, in the 1970s: “This poem I hate”.

The political turn of 1934, the policy of alliance, the popular front, the defense of the French culture allow him to reach responsibilities where he flourishes. The intellectual mastery that he begins to hold is however not without shadows. In 1935, during the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, he was not among those who questioned the socialism of the Soviet regime, despite the information on the terror that was being installed, under the guise of revolution, in the USSR. He was very close to Mikhaïl Koltsov, a famous Pravda journalist who informed the Soviet secret services about Western personalities. Aragon opposed his former friend André Breton, who wanted to use the platform of the congress to defend Victor Serge, imprisoned there. On the contrary, in 1935, he praised the merits of the Soviet concentration camp system, the Gulag:

“I want to talk about the prodigious science of re-education of man, which makes the criminal a useful man, the individual deformed by yesterday”s society, by the forces of darkness, a man of tomorrow”s world, a man according to History. The extraordinary experience of the canal from the White Sea to the Baltic, where thousands of men and women, the underbelly of a society, understood, in front of the task to be accomplished, by the effect of persuasion of a small number of Chekists who directed them, spoke to them, convinced them that the time has come when a thief, for example, must requalify, in another profession – This extraordinary experience plays in relation to the new science the role of the story of the apple that falls in front of Newton in relation to physics. We are at a moment in the history of mankind that resembles in some ways the period of the passage from ape to man. We are at the moment when a new class, the proletariat, has just undertaken this historical task of unprecedented greatness: the re-education of man by man.”

He also defended the Moscow trials, writing in Commune in 1936 that they were dominated by “the figure (…) of Trotsky, ally of the Gestapo, the international saboteur of the workers” movement. It is this utopian and naive optimism that will collapse after the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in a tear of which his great collection, The Unfinished Novel, will bear witness in 1956. But 1934 was an optimistic era for the French communists: it was the era of the refusal of the sectarianism that had been that of the PCF in the 1920s, of the alliance with the middle strata of French society to constitute a broad front of resistance against the European fascisms that were gradually taking hold, which led Aragon to publish pro-Soviet writings: “What is this flame at the front of the procession

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he went to Madrid in a truck carrying a printing press and a film projector. There he met with the “Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture”, traveled to the front line, and participated in a meeting on October 25, 1936. He declared that “France has dishonored itself by not holding back the hand of fascism. On his return, with Jean-Richard Bloch, he asked in vain for a meeting with Léon Blum to convince him to intervene with the Spanish Republic.

In August 1939, the very day of the announcement of the signing of the German-Soviet Pact, in the communist newspaper of which he was the director, he applauded Stalin”s decision, while calling on France and England to sign a tripartite alliance with the USSR:

“The non-aggression pact with Germany, imposed on Hitler who had no other option than to capitulate or to go to war, is the triumph of this Soviet will to peace. (…) And let us not compare the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, which does not imply any surrender on the part of the USSR, with the “friendship” pacts signed with Hitler by the governments still in power in France and England: these friendship pacts were based on the Munich capitulation… The USSR has never admitted and will never admit similar international crimes. Silence to the anti-Soviet pack! We are at the day of the collapse of its hopes. We are on the day when it must be recognized that something has changed in the world and that, because there is the USSR, wars are not waged as we wish.

There is a treaty of mutual assistance between France and Poland. This means that if Poland is the victim of an aggression, France must come to its aid. And any good Frenchman who does not want to see a repeat of the shame of Munich, and the abandonment of our allies in Czechoslovakia, will wish, as we do, that France would keep its international commitments.”

As soon as this article by Aragon was published, the communist press was seized and the PCF was outlawed. Some communist leaders were arrested, and Aragon took refuge for a few days in the Chilean Embassy, hidden by his friend Pablo Neruda. In September, following the Nazi Germany”s attack on Poland, he was drafted as an auxiliary doctor on the front line, during what was called the phoney war.

On the front finally opened to the West in May 1940, suffering the debacle of the French armies, he showed a courage that earned him the Croix de Guerre and the Military Medal. These months of war were the source of a large part of the poems in the collection Les Yeux d”Elsa, published in 1942 by Pierre Seghers. Afterwards, he took refuge in the free zone, where he continued to write the poems that make up this collection. He participated, as much through his writing as as an underground organizer, in the Resistance in the intellectual world. His poetic work is put at the service of patriotic mobilization, particularly in a booklet entitled Contribution to the cycle of Gabriel Peri, where he celebrates his homeland of a hundred villages, The Rose and the Reseda, Gabriel Peri, Ballad of the one who sang in torments, and Honoré d”Estienne d”Orves, offering the maquisards The Song of the free rider. He also participated, with Elsa Triolet, in the creation of the National Committee of Writers in the southern zone. Under the pseudonym of Le Témoin des Martyrs, he also published with Vercors Deux voix françaises Péguy-Péri (éd. de Minuit, 1944).

Singer of the Resistance in dangerous times, he is after the war, with Paul Éluard, Pierre Seghers, René Char, the poetic witness, the watchman of a memory. This is how he composed, in 1955, Strophes pour se souvenir, a poem glorifying the role of foreigners in the Resistance, celebrating the Francs-tireurs et partisans of the MOI of the Manouchian group, whose condemnation had been published on a red poster.

At the Liberation, strengthened by the influence he had gained in the Resistance, Louis Aragon acquired the status of a communist intellectual, defender of a political line. Thus, as a member of the National Writers” Committee, he took on the task of purging literary circles, with all its necessities and excesses. He defended the Soviet condemnation of Tito”s regime in Yugoslavia, as well as celebrating the leaders of the time, Maurice Thorez in particular. He became the champion of Stalin:

“Thank you to Stalin for these men who were forged by his example, according to his thought, theory and practice Stalinist! Thanks to Stalin who made possible the training of these men, guarantors of French independence, of our people”s will for peace, of the future of a working class, the first in the world to climb to the sky and which will not be diverted from its destiny by making it see thirty-six foreign stars, when it has such men at its head!”

In 1950, Louis Aragon, at the request of Thorez, was elected to the Central Committee of the French Communist Party. He took part with the authority that this position gave him in the various ideological debates that shook his party after the death of Stalin, and even more so after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1956. Within the PCF, his eminent position does not make him immune to attacks. Thus, when in 1953, the Lettres françaises published a drawing of Picasso, on the occasion of the death of Stalin, he was forced to make amends before the critics who considered the portrait iconoclastic. Over the years, informed of the Stalinist repression through Elsa Triolet, his positions evolve, but he prefers to keep silent than to harm his camp. His journal does not address head-on the issues of Stalinism in these years. In 1956, he did not take a position on the “Khrushchev report”, remained silent on the events in Poland, as well as on the repression of the insurgents in Budapest, subscribing, by his silence, to the official thesis of his Party, according to which the Hungarian insurrection was the work of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and was put down by the workers with the support of the Red Army. These events provoked, among other things, the breakup of the National Writers” Committee, which Vercors left. It is on the literary level, in what can be considered as his poetic autobiography, The Unfinished Novel, that Aragon will address, the same year, the personal suffering caused by the revelations and political disillusionment of this terrible year:

“One thousand nine hundred and fifty six like a dagger on my eyelids.

Gradually, however, with the revelation of the crimes of the regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe, Aragon came to a very strong condemnation of the authoritarian practices of Soviet communism. He opened his newspaper to dissidents, he condemned the trials against intellectuals, especially in 1966 during the trial of the writers Siniavski and Daniel during which he chose to express himself in L”Humanité to denounce the repression that fell in Moscow on the two Soviet writers. In May 1968, he showed strong sympathy for the student movement. Then, in August of the same year, the intervention of Soviet troops that put an end to the Prague Spring. At that time, Aragon prefaced the French translation of Milan Kundera”s book, La Plaisanterie. His anger makes him write a strong text:

“And now, one late night, on the transistor, we heard the condemnation of our perpetual illusions…”

However, when he died in 1982, he was still “officially” a member of the Central Committee of the PCF.

Aragon was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1956.

In 1943, Francis Poulenc composed two songs on poems from the collection Les Yeux d”Elsa, C and Fêtes galantes, created in Paris Salle Gaveau by the singer Pierre Bernac accompanied on piano by the composer. The first song taken from a work by Aragon dates from 1953; composed and performed by Georges Brassens, it takes the poem Il n”y a pas d”amour heureux, published in La Diane française in 1944 but adapted for the occasion by the libertarian singer, who removes the patriotic evocations relating to the Resistance.

Léo Ferré was the first to dedicate an entire album to Aragon, with Les Chansons d”Aragon in 1961.

Many of Aragon”s poems have been set to music by Lino Léonardi, Hélène Martin, Jean Ferrat, Véronique Pestel and Georges Brassens, and sung by Catherine Sauvage, Yves Montand, Alain Barrière, Isabelle Aubret, Francesca Solleville, Nicole Rieu, Monique Morelli or Marc Ogeret.

His 1943 poem, in homage to Gabriel Péri, the Ballade de celui qui chanta dans les supplices (Ballad of the one who sang in torments) was set to music by Joseph Kosma in his 1960 cantata, interpreted by the soloists of the orchestra of the Théâtre national de l”Opéra, René Schmidt (tenor), Xavier Depraz (bass), Serge Baudo (direction). Vega disc T35A2501.

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Contrasting readings of singers on Aragon

In his album Stratégie de l”inespoir (2014), the singer and poet Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine criticizes the blindness of Louis Aragon (“In the 1930s, Aragon had returned enchanted from the USSR, wondering what he saw from the bus window. Céline was writing his first pamphlet Mea Culpa, Orwell was writing Animal Farm.”) in the face of Stalinism in the refrain of the song Karaganda (camp 99):

“It is the murderous history which reddens under our steps. It is the voice of Stalin, it is the laughter of Beriac, it is the racy rhyme of Aragon and Elsac, it is the cry of the dead children in Karaganda.

Conversely, or complementarily, Jean Ferrat, one of the most popular interpreters of the poet, retained in 1975, during the composition of an eponymous record, a line from Le Fou d”Elsa (“The future of man is woman. She is the color of his soul. “) which he made the title of a resolutely optimistic (and feminist) song, La femme est l”avenir de l”homme:

“The poet is always rightWho sees higher than the horizonAnd the future is his kingdomFacing our generationI declare with AragonWoman is the future of man.”

In her album Mon Aragon, Véronique Pestel takes the verses extracted from the Zadjal de l”avenir in Le Fou d”Elsa. She sets 12 poems by Louis Aragon to music, including La Complainte de Pablo Neruda.

Also read, biographies – Woodrow Wilson

Stories, novels, short stories and correspondence

Also read, biographies – Guglielmo Marconi

External links

Sources