When Louis Aragon, one of the founding fathers of dada and surrealism, turned to the proletariat for regeneration, he did so with that splendid violence characteristic of the cults he once championed…. His poem, "The Red Front," brought down the wrath of the authorities upon his head, as their police minds would not put down to poetic license his open advocacy of the shooting of prominent politicians.

In time, however, Aragon's initial intoxication gradually gave way to the more sober tendencies in the literature to which he was now organically bound. And it is a tribute to the integrating powers of the doctrine he embraced that his first novel written under its influence [The Bells of Basel (Les Cloches de Bâle)] should surprise us by its gravity of intention and maturity of performance. This poet of cosmopolitan rhetoric has turned into an eager student of history; and...