His biological father, Louis Andrieux, a former senator for Forcalquier, was married and thirty years older than Aragon's mother, whom he seduced when she was seventeen.

[6] Aragon was also critical of the USSR, particularly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956) during which Joseph Stalin's personality cult was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev.

The French surrealists had long claimed Lewis Carroll as one of their own, and Aragon published his translation of The Hunting of the Snark[11] in 1929, "shortly before he completed his transition from Snarxism to Marxism", as Martin Gardner puts it.

[13] Aragon became a member of the directing committee of the Commune journal in January 1937, along with André Gide, Romain Rolland and Paul Vaillant-Couturier.

[citation needed] In March 1937, Aragon was called on by the PCF to head the new evening daily Ce soir, which he was charged with launching, along with the writer Jean-Richard Bloch.

In 1939, he married Russian-born author Elsa Triolet, the sister of Lilya Brik, a mistress and then partner of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Otto Abetz was the German governor, and produced a series of "black lists" of authors forbidden to be read, circulated or sold in Nazi Occupied France.

[15] During the war, Aragon wrote for the underground press Les Éditions de Minuit and was a member of the National Front Resistance movement.

He thus wrote, in 1954, Strophes pour se souvenir in commemoration of the role of foreigners in the Resistance, which celebrated the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI).

The theme of the poem was the Red Poster affair, mainly the last letter that Missak Manouchian, an Armenian-French poet and Resistant, wrote to his wife Mélinée before his execution on 21 February 1944.

[citation needed] In the days following the disappearance of Ce soir, in March 1953, Aragon became the director of L'Humanité's literary supplement, Les Lettres françaises.

After Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" about Stalin delivered in 1956, Aragon suffered a deep personal crisis, but it was not until the 1960s when he started openly criticizing the Soviet regime.

He directed the EFR along with Madeleine Braun, and in the 1950s published French and Soviet writers commonly related to the "Socialist Realism" current.

[24] He was and still is a popular poet in France because many of his poems have been set to music and sung by various composers and singers: Lino Léonardi, Hélène Martin, Léo Ferré (the first one to dedicate an entire LP to Aragon, with his 1961 breakthrough Les Chansons d'Aragon album), Jean Ferrat, Georges Brassens, Alain Barrière, Isabelle Aubret, Nicole Rieu, Monique Morelli, Marc Ogeret, Marjo Tal, et al.

Many of his poems set to music by Jean Ferrat have been translated into German by Didier Caesar (alias Dieter Kaiser) and are sung by his Duo.