Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript, signed at the top, Aragon vous parle: De l'Armée, [1960]; 5 1/2 pages in-4 with erasures and corrections. About the Algerian war and the film about the Normandie-Niemen squadron (article published in n°750 of France Nouvelle, weekly of the French Communist Party). "It is a great misfortune in a nation when the people detach themselves from their army, when the army is no longer anything but an instrument of the few against the people, when the name of the fatherland no longer has the same meaning for those who are in charge of the fatherland and those who are its flesh and blood". Aragon briefly retraces the history of the French army from the royal wars to "the ordeal of the occupation and the resurrection of the Resistance". But he is concerned to see, with the Algerian war, "the army perverted, in the hands of colonels, becoming an instrument against the nation, and against the very power it had at first seemed to call forth". Aragon reflects on what the army should be, in reference to the film Normandie-Niémen, "which touches on both questions of military greatness and servitude, and on what underpins an alliance in which many of us in France believe that without it there can be no security of our borders, no assurance of world peace". He protests against the praise of "deaf and blind obedience in the army", which is a "Vichy attitude"; in Algiers in January (the week of the barricades), "patriotism would certainly have been disobedience [...]. The national interest lies in the amalgam of the nation and the army"...