Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript signed, Discours aux étudiants de Paris, April 1945; 7pages in-4 plus a title page. Speech "delivered at the Mutualité, in the spring of 1945 (on the evening of April 24)", supplemented by a poem from La Diane Française. At the bottom of the title page, Aragon wrote: "Manuscript put up for sale on June 21, 1945 at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild for the benefit of the "Comité National des Écrivains", which had emerged from the Resistance. This manuscript contains a copy of the poem Du Poète à son parti from La Diane Française". In this speech to students, Aragon gives pride of place to the French Communist Party, which made him "a Frenchman, and a man, not by giving him a membership card in 1927, but by modifying him every day a little with its lessons and practice". Above all, he wishes to pay tribute "to the man who presides over this evening, to one of the greatest physicists of this century, whose name, work and figure are yet more reasons for the whole world to love and admire France [...], Professor Paul Langevin", about whom he writes vibrant lines... Aragon then evokes at length the memory of Gabriel Péri, who joined the Party "in his youth, and who died for himself and for his country, never separating one from the other"... He traces Péri's intellectual and political evolution from his discovery of dialectical materialism and reading of Marx and Engels, to his heroic death, a perfect example of a "French communist intellectual". In the Party's Pantheon, Aragon also names Anatole France, Henri Barbusse and "one of the creators of modern music, Erik Satie". He also salutes "our great Paul Vaillant-Couturier, to whom I owe so much, and who was the very symbol of the alliance between intellectuals and the workers and peasants of France". He also cites, among other Party members, "the great painter Pablo Picasso", and Paul Eluard, "who represents the purest point of our poetry"... And he ends with his tribute poem (3 quintins), Du poète à son parti: "My party gave me back my eyes and my memory I no longer knew what a child knows That my blood was so red and my heart was French I only knew that the night was black My party has given me back my eyes and my memory"...