Robert Aron

Robert Aron (May 25, 1898, Le Vésinet, Yvelines – April 19, 1975, Paris) was a French writer who authored a number of works on politics and history.

Biography

Early years

The son of an established stockbroker, Robert Aron was from an upper-class Jewish family with origins in Eastern France. After attending the Lycée Condorcet, he joined the military and was injured on the front as an officer in 1918 at the end of World War I.

Career

Receiving a degree in literature after the war, he did not teach and instead joined the publishing house Éditions Gallimard, where he was for some time the secretary of Gaston Gallimard. He also worked as a film critic for the magazine La Revue du Cinéma, and wrote about politics in the foreign service for La Revue des Deux Mondes. His interest in post-war avant-garde literature and art and its most modern and provocative expressions was the impetus behind the creation, together with Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac, of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry.

Although he was somewhat disappointed by his early experiences, his life took a new turn as he became reacquainted with a fellow, former student of the Lycée Condorcet, Arnaud Dandieu, in 1927. Their work together in political and philosophical research in support of communism spawned three works in the early 1930s : Décadence de la Nation Française (1931, "Decline of the French Nation"), Le Cancer Américain (1931, "The American Cancer") and La Révolution Nécessaire (1933, "The Necessary Revolution"). These works constituted the principal theoretical base on which he created the group l'Ordre Nouveau (The New Order) in 1930, which with Esprit represented one of the most original expressions of the Nonconformist Movement during the 1930s. Closely collaborating with Dandieu until his death in 1933, Aron took a very active part in all of the activities of l'Ordre Nouveau until its end in 1938. Thereafter, Aron's activities and viewpoints would be influenced by these experiences.