Louis Aragon was a French poet and one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in Paris. Born in Paris on the 3rd of October 1897, he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, although believing them to be his sister and foster mother: he was only told the truth at the age of 19 when he left home to serve in the First World War. During the war he saw action which had seen him constantly barraged by shellfire (he was reportedly once buried by explosions three times in one day) and earned the Croix de Guerre for his heroism in rescuing injured soldiers. His first novel, Anicet, was written during this time.
In 1927 he joined the Communist Party and in 1939 married Russian-born author Elsa Triolet, with whom he collaborated in the left-wing French media before and during the Second World War. At the outbreak of war he was enlisted in the medical corps, attached to a tank regiment and sent to the Front. In one of the first actions of the “Battle of France” his division were defeated and he was captured, but managed to lead thirty-six men in an escape back across French lines. That, combined with his later bravery in rescuing men under fire, was enough to earn him a second Croix de Guerre.
He was demobilized after the French surrender in May 1940 and he and Elsa fled to the south of France where they joined the Resistance. In 1941 the writers Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure set up Les Éditions de Minuit (”The Midnight Press”), and they published a collection of patriotic poems by Louis called Le Musée Grévin (after a waxwork museum in Paris). He used the pseudonym François la colère (”The Anger of France”). (Another pseudonym he used was Le Témoin des Martyrs – “The Witness Of Martyrs”.) In addition he and Elsa produced underground newspapers like Les Etoiles (”The Stars”) which were distributed throughout France in secret. During the war his work was smuggled out of France and published in Switzerland.
After the war he published a collection of his Resistance poetry and continued to refer to the Resistance in his post-war poems: in particular ‘Strophes pour se souvenir’, written in 1954, commemorated the role of twenty-three Resistance fighters known as the Manouchian Group who had been executed in 1944. The poem was partially based on the last letter that the leader of the group, a French-Armenian poet named Missak Manouchian, wrote to his wife Mélinée.
Louis Aragon died on the 24th of December 1982.
Louis Aragon’s Poems:
Resources for Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon: Surrealist Poet and Communist (apologies this page does carry a lot of advertising)
The Conspiracy of the Poets an article written by Aragon’s publisher and friend, Pierre Seghers, about the involvement of French poets in the Resistance. Published in October 1945 in a special edition of the magazine Poetry, devoted to the poets of the French occupation and resistance