‘Will we be Coca-colonised?’: Louis Aragon’s national poetry at the cold-war cultural front

This article recounts the French communist poet Louis Aragon’s appeals, over a number of years, for a return to traditional French poetic forms, most notably the sonnet in alexandrines, with a view to finding literary forms that express nationalistic sentiment. His project was motivated above all by a communist focus on resisting foreign domination, in the first instance the direct domination of France by Germany during the Second World War, and, in the second, a more insidious projection of American power in the early years of the Cold War. Relying primarily on a selection of Aragon’s texts from the 1930s to the 1950s, the vast majority of which remain unavailable in English, I try to show that this ‘second instance’, that is, the effort to promote the sonnet as a weapon against Atlanticist assimilationism, was an unsuccessful attempt to enact a repetition of the triumphs of the French Resistance’s literary intellectuals, but in far less propitious conditions, largely because of the increasing isolation, even outright pariah status of communists in French political life.