Dall’integrazione nella patria francese alla nascita del sentimento nazionale: i combattenti magrebini nei Communistes di Aragon Valerio Cordiner*∗

Abstract

Louis Aragon is one of the French authors most sensitive to the national question, especially in its dialectical connection with colonial events. From his youthful rejection of all homelands, he evolved – at the time of the Popular Fronts and in the wake of the Jacobin tradition – towards a conception of French identity as a communion of values rather than a community of blood. The awareness of the unsustainability of the colonial regime in the post-war world order stimulated a further development of his thinking: from assimilatory patriotism to the right of peoples to self-determination. The fate of the colonial troops deployed at the front in May-June 1940, as depicted in the novel Les Communistes (1949-1951), exemplifies this awareness, to which Barrès’s teaching paradoxically also contributed.