Translated into English by Rolfe Humphries, and others.


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


In 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.