Louis ARAGON
Servitude et grandeur des français
La Bibliothèque Française, Paris 1945, 11,5x18,5cm, relié sous chemise et étui.
Servitude et Grandeur des Français [Servitude and Greatness of the French]La Bibliothèque française | Paris 1945 | 11.5 x 18.5 cm | half morocco in custom chemise and slipcase
First edition, one of the advance,
service de presse copies.
Half grey morocco over paper boards decorated with abstract motifs by P. Goy & C. Vilaine, gilt note to foot of spine «ex. de Nusch et Paul Eluard» [Nusch and Paul Eluard's copy], gilt filet frame to covers, grey pastedowns and endpapers, covers and spine (sunned) preserved, top edge gilt, slipcase edged with grey morocco and chemise of half grey morocco over paper boards with abstract motifs, lined with grey paper.
Moving autograph inscription signed by Louis Aragon to Paul and Nusch Éluard on the half-title: «à Paul et Nusch pour lire en voyage bien affectueusement Louis.» («For Paul and Nusch with best wishes to read on their travels»).
A handsome inscription symbolic of the reconciliation between the two greatest poets of the Resistance, whose friendship was affected by the artistic
and political upsets of the 20th century.
Barely 20, neither Aragon nor Éluard had published anything when they met at André Breton's improvised literary salon in 1919.
Like him, they were both enthusiastic for a while about the Dada adventure. But the lack of seriousness and political challenge in the movement begun by Tzara soon led to their violent rupture with the latter and their founding of Surrealism, which had more revolutionary ambitions.
However, Aragon's devotion to Communism and Éluard's ideological intransigence (with André Breton behind him) got the better of their artistically fruitful friendship. In 1932 Éluard, following Aragon's public statements on several issues, published a pamphlet in which he drew a line – which he intended to be permanent – under their friendship. But the harshness of the argument could not mask the deep affection he felt for Aragon: «I knew Aragon for fourteen years, and I have long had an unreserved faith in him...Aragon changed and his memory alone can no longer bind him to me.»
This public distancing affected both writers deeply and secretly.
«I have never done anything that cost me more dearly. To break like this with a friend from all my youth was not just awful for a few days. It is a wound I inflicted on myself and which has never healed,» (Aragon in
Une préface morcelée).
Over a decade Aragon and Éluard, each taken up with their own utopias, did not meet at all but did occasionally make discreet gestures to each other. Thus in 1936, Aragon sought out Éluard for a poem for the Republican cause in Spain, which was published in
L'Humanité and introduced by Aragon with these words: «There is general consensus among the critics that Paul Éluard is one of the greatest poets of his generation. We are pleased to publish here a previously unpublished poem by him that will wither Franco's flags.» The fire of a true friendship burned under the ashes of their different ideals.
The cataclysm of 1940 showed the true nature of both. While most of their «revolutionary» friends fled the country or took refuge in a prudent wait-and-see attitude, Éluard and Aragon refused compromise altogether and nailed their colors to the flag against the occupying forces.
Going underground with the publication of
Poésie 42, Paul and Nusch reconnected with their friend in April 1943, «flowers in hand». The two «great voices of the poetic Resistance,» went on to produce numerous clandestine publications and restore – with others – the «honor of poets.» Éluard in Paris and Aragon in the South organized the intellectual Resistance, refusing to leave France despite various offers.
During the Liberation «Éluard...after five years of being locked in France, was yearning to travel and see once more his friends abroad.» He left to rest in Switzerland with Nusch and Claude Roy while the Communist Party held its first legal Congress in Paris.
Not holding a grudge for the loss of affection that led to their former separation, Aragon here offers his ineluctable friend something «to read on your travels,» a poignant witness to their shared fight for freedom. Indeed, following in the footsteps of Vigny, who had a century before already described the heroism of combat and its sense of self-abnegation,
Servitude et Grandeur des Français brings together several Resistance short stories as distributed famously by «la Bibliothèque française», co-founded during the occupation by Aragon, Éluard and Seghers.
Aragon and Éluard never spoke of their dispute, except a few months after Nusch's death, which left Paul in pieces as Aragon recalled in 1965:
«One day, unannounced, Paul turned up in rue de la Sourdière and with frightening calm told me and Elsa that...there was no way he could go on living and he was going to kill himself...All of a sudden, I felt full of a violent resolution...I took my friend in my arms in my anger...We all knew that when I had lost all my friends fifteen or sixteen years before, Éluard had issued a horrible text against me. We had never spoken of it until that day. What good would it do? We had come back to each other, that was the main thing. But then, at that moment, I hurled it in his face, I shouted. You're going because it suits you and you're leaving me with those words I'll never forget, and that will now follow me with ever more force than before since killing yourself gives the words of the deceased some sort of grotesque authority...You're going. You're going to spite me...Paul was pale, he said nothing. I didn't stop. I kept on and on at him. I shook his soul. In the end, he took my hand and he told me: «I promise you...I'll try...». When Éluard died in 1952, Les Lettres françaises published a vibrant homage from Aragon to his unique friend: «I will not speak of his death. I will never speak of his death. I will speak again of his life. I came to speak of that. Of our life. Of what I still know of our life,» (Aragon, 29 May 1965).
An exceptional copy bringing together the two greatest names in politically engaged poetry of the 20th century.
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