Louis Aragon Biography and List of Works

Poet, novelist, and essayist, a founder of Surrealism with Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Luis Buñuel among others. Aragon's work reflects the principal trends of thought of the 20th century - he was also a political activist and spokesman for communism. His influence on the theory of the novel and on poetic theory has been considerable.

"Ma patrie est comme une barque
Qu'abandonnèrent ses haleurs
Et je ressemble à ce monarque
Plus malheureux que le malheur
Qui restait roi de ses douleurs"
(from 'Richard II quarante')

Louis Aragon was born in Paris in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, where his family ran a pension. He studied at Lycée Carnot and graduated in 1916. He began then his medical studies at the University of Paris. In World War I Aragon served briefly as an 'auxiliary doctor'. After the war he continued with his studies.

Through the Surrealist poet André Breton, Aragon was introduced to Dadaism and Surrealism. In 1919 he founded the review Littérature with Breton and Philippe Soupault. The magazine and public happenings were a vehicle to scorn on all the bourgeois values that intellectuals saw destroyed by the horrors of war. Aragon's first collection of poems, Feu de joie (1920), echoes the proposal of the Dadaists to destroy all traditional institutions and values. Picasso's success prompted Aragon to publish Anicet; ou, Le panorama (1921), in which the painter Bleu was a parody of Picasso. Bleu "the genius of our times" is juxtaposed with Jean Chipre, who suffers in poverty and oblivion. "I have never painted except to seduce", Bleu concludes in the novel.

Anicet was followed by Le Mouvement perpétuel (1925) - they both mocked poeticism and reflected the dadaist play with words. Aragon's novel Le paysan de Paris (1926) mythologized the arcades and parks of Paris, and described the author's adventures in quest of surreality.

To break out from the political vacuum, surrealists adopted the idea that only through a change in the social structure would a revolution of ideas be possible. Like many radical intellectuals in the 1920s, Aragon joined the Communist Party, and in 1930 he visited the Soviet Union. Back in France, he published The Red Front, a poem influenced by Mayakovsky. It called for a revolution in France and Aragon received a five-year suspended sentence. In 1928 he met the Russian-born Elsa Triolet, his future wife, who deeply influenced his writing.

After the journey, Aragon's political commitment resulted in a break with the Surrealists. He contributed to such Communist journals as L'Humanité, Commune and Europe. From 1937 to 1940 he was co-editor of the newspaper Ce Soir. The paper was outlawed because of his defence of the Russo-German Pact.

Aragon's novels in the 1930s and 1940s, as in the cycle long novels Le Monde réel (1934-51, 5 vols.), advocated socialist realism. Persécuté persécuteur (1931) and Hourra l'Oural (1934) were more political manifestos that poetical works. His massive fresco Le Monde réel drew a vivid picture of bourgeoisie from 1880 to the end of the 1920s. In the cycle Aragon sought to interweave the individual destinies of his characters, his sense of place and eye for the telling detail, with the broader lines of the Marxist interpretation of history.

During the Spanish Civil War, Aragon fought against the Nationalists, and when the Nazis occupied France in WW II he was a member of Resistance movement. During this period a new nationalistic sentiment entered into Aragon's poetry. He helped to build up through the National Writer's Committee a network of major and minor writers who contributed to the Resistance journals, among them La Drôme en armes and Étoiles. Many of Aragon's poems were set to music and quoted in letters. Le crève-coeur (1941) was the first of five other collections that chronicled France under the Nazi occupation.

"Que l'un fût de la chapelle
Et l'autre s'y dérobât
Celui qui croyait au ciel
Ceui qui n'y croyait pais
Tous les deux étaient fidèles
Des lèvres du cœur des bras
Et tous kes deux disaient qu'elle
Vive et qui vivra verra"
(from 'La rose et le réséda')

After the liberation, Aragon resumed the editorship of Ce Soir until its demise in 1953. In Les Communistes (1949-51) Aragon played with a new kind of novel that gave the effect of a series of newspaper reports, editorials, and Communist Party speeches. From 1953 to 1972 he was editor of the arts and literature weekly Les Lettres françaises. In 1950-1960 he served on the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, and in 1957 he was rewarded with the Lenin Peace Prize.

'"Poor Aragon," Picasso chuckled as soon as Aragon had left his studio. "He doesn't know anything about pigeons. And as for the gentle dove, what a myth that is! There's no crueller animal... How's that for a symbol of Peace?"'
(from Picasso: Creator & Destroyer by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, 1988)

When Stalin died in 1953, Aragon published a portrait of him in Les Lettres françaises under the headline 'What We Owe to Stalin". It was drawn by Picasso and arose fury. Aragon thanked the party leaders for their rebuke and published excerpts from the outraged letters sent from the different Communist cells. After the uproar had died down Picasso asked: "How can Aragon, a poet, endorse the view that it is the public which should judge reality?"

In 1968 Aragon publicly condemned the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia - he also attacked Stalinism. Arangon's later works include autobiographical poems, critical works, a history of the Soviet Union, and historical novel Holy Week, which centred on Louis XVIII's flight to Brussels from the advancing Napoleon in 1815. Among its several characters is the painter Géricault, who discovers his commitment to the masses.

In his last novels, Aragon expressed a hostile attitude toward Socialist Realism. In 1965 he began a new series of novels, including La mise à mort (1965), Blanche; ou L'oubli (1967), and Théâtre/Roman (1974), in which his fictional material came from his own experiences. Aragon died on December 24, 1982 in Paris.

For further reading: Aragon: Poet of the Resistance ed. by H. Josephson and M. Cowley (1945); Communism and the French Intellectuals by D. Caute (1964); Malraux, Sartre, Aragon as Political Novelists by C. Savage (1965); Louis Aragon by L.F. Becker (1971); Aragon by P. Daix (1975); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by M. Seumour-Smith and A.C. Kimmens (1996); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Sefafin (1999, vol. 1)

Note: Aragon was married to writer Elsa Triolet (1896-1970), the Russian-born sister-in-law of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She received in 1944 Prix Goncourt for her book Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs. Other works: Bonsoir Thérèse (1938), Maïakowski (1939), Le cheval blanc (1943), Les amants d'Avignon (1943), L'inspecteur des ruines (1948), Le cheval roux (1953), Le monument (1957), Le grand jamais (1965), Ecoutez-voir (1968), Le rossignol se tait à l'aube (1970).

Books by Louis Aragon