Louis Aragon’s collection Le Crève-cœur (Heartbreak, 1941) contains 22 poems written between October 1939 and October 1940, the last nine of which express the heartbreak caused by the calamity of the German invasion of France and the subsequent occupation. The best known of them, Les lilas et les roses, first published in Le Figaro, owes its title to the two flowers that symbolize the two stages of the May–June 1940 war: the German invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, and of France in June.

On June 14, the German army entered Paris, which surrendered without a fight; French soldiers and civilians fled toward the south of France, and an armistice was signed by Marshal Pétain that marked the beginning of collaboration between the Vichy regime and Nazi Germany.

The poem consists of three eight-line stanzas framed by a single four-line stanza at the beginning and the end; it is written in the traditional French alexandrine (12-syllable) verse with different alternating rhymes (abab) in each four-line section. Aragon omits all punctuation, thereby creating an incessant flow of memories, a “whirl” (tourbillon) of seemingly loosely juxtaposed images. Syntactically, nearly all the images are the direct object of the constantly reiterated je n’oublierai pas (I shall not forget), which in large part constitutes the only principal clause. This technique of an accumulation of images without explicit interpretative connection may in Aragon’s case be partly due to surrealist ideas about the operation of the unconscious, but here also creates the impression of the writer’s being haunted by an uncontrollable surge of memory.

The poem begins with an evocation of the violent change brought about by the German invasion: “Ô mois des floraisons mois des métamorphoses / Mai qui fut sans nuage et Juin poignardé” (O months of flowering months of changes / May that was cloudless and June that was stabbed in the back). The “cloudlessness” of May expresses in a figurative and a literal sense the passivity of the French army in the first month of the “pseudowar” (drôle de guerre, as it has been called) that was ended by the treason (“stabbing in the back”) of those who did not defend France but began to collaborate with the invaders.

The second stanza recalls the “tragic illusion” (l’illusion tragique) of the Belgians, who prematurely expected an easy victory of the French and British troops over the German invaders in May 1940: “Le triomphe imprudent qui prime la querelle” (The unwise triumph that prevailed over the quarrel). May is the month of the lilac, which blooms only briefly; in its transience it betokens the enthusiastic greeting of the French troops in Belgium, whom the “elated populace” smothered with flowers in their “intoxicated” hope of victory: “Entourés de lilas par un peuple grisé” (Surrounded by lilacs by an elated populace). Again, images of beauty and death are sharply juxtaposed: “Le sang que préfigure en carmin le baiser” (The blood that the carmine kiss foreshadows).

In the third stanza, Aragon turns in a wistful and nostalgic tone to France itself as it once was: “Je n’oublierai jamais les jardins de la France” (I shall never forget the gardens of France). The rose as the symbol of love and beauty, standing for all that is precious in the French name and history, is shamefully repudiated by the headlong flight of French troops and civilians down rose-bordered roads: “Le démenti des fleurs au vent de la panique / Aux soldats qui passaient sur l’aile de la peur” (The denial of the flowers by the panicked wind / By the soldiers who passed by on the wing of fear). The personification of bicycles as “delirious” and of cannons as “ironic” and the characterization of campers as “false” have an almost dadaistic playfulness about them, expressing the pseudo-character of the drôle de guerre that was not really fought.

The “whirl of images” gains a new focal point in the next stanza. The speaker’s memory recalls seemingly disconnected elements such as the village of Sainte-Marthe, a general, black foliage, and a Norman villa. They are related in Aragon’s mind by the fateful news of the surrender of Paris in June 1940, which he received at Sainte-Marthe in Normandy: “On nous a dit ce soir que Paris s’est rendu” (They said to us that evening that Paris has surrendered). The unconnected phrase “un général” could be a reference to the fact that in June 1940 Charles de Gaulle fled France for England, fearing that the new collaborationist government would arrest him.

What cannot be expunged from memory is depicted in the last stanza in the image of lilacs tinged by the shadow of death: “Douceur de l’ombre dont la mort farde les joues” (Sweetness of the shadow by which death colors cheeks). The expression “lilas des Flandres” (lilacs of Flanders) alludes to the dead of another world war (the poppies of Flanders) and turns the lilacs into flowers of death. Roses, the oldest symbol of love and beauty, evoke here both the burning red of distant conflagration (l’incendie au loin) and the “roses of Anjou” symbolizing the glorious French past. Through the whirl of syntactically disconnected images clustered around the symbols of the lilac and the rose, the poem transforms the traumatic events of May–June 1940 into a painful soul-searching of the French nation.

Bibliography
Adereth, M. Aragon. The Resistance Poems. London: Grant & Cutler, 1985.
Aragon, Louis. L’Oeuvre poétique. 2nd ed., Vol. 3, Book 9. Paris: Messidor/Livre Club Diderot, 1989, 1,069–1,139.
Aragon, Louis. Le Crève-cœur—Le Nouveau Crève-cœur. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
Becker, Lucille Frackman. Louis Aragon. New York: Twayne, 1971. Available online. URL: https://archive.org/details/louisaragon00beck. Accessed on April 23, 2025.

Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature

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