CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

By: Nikhil Singh
February 28, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

PARIS PEASANT

Librairie Gallimard published Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant in 1926.

Cited as a co-founder of Surrealism, Aragon actually opposed the designation of terminology and a concrete identity to the movement. He very publically left the growing Surrealist movement as soon as Breton wrote his manifesto. Though, by that late stage he had been interminably infected by the ideology of the growing communist movement, which he later decried for its overall ineffectiveness in social practice.

Le Paysan Paris is often seen as Aragon’s masterwork — known chiefly in the West for its influence on Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project. The influence derives directly from a chapter in which Aragon details a hyperreal tour of the consumerist innards of the legendary arcade district of 1920s Paris. Technological booms around the turn of the century spurred many environmental changes and shifts, which for a previously (largely) pastoral society was deeply ‘surreal.’ Aragon’s documentation of the overwhelming sensory overload of the arcades flirts with future visions — anticipating internet browsing, mall culture, and the overall satiation of a coming consumerism. The inspection of these budding cultures is also refreshingly free of the cynicism that is usually associated with them. Instead, Aragon explores the lure of magic — the witchcraft of sales, for inherent in consumerist culture is the evocation of bondage. In order to persuade a customer, a product must bewitch and beguile. Yet, Aragon does not dwell on, or augur, the systems of manipulation inherent in such tactical persuasion as jaded, contemporary culture does. Rather, his exploration of the multitudinous, many-faceted arcades presents a haunting reef of intentional, yet unintended, juxtapositions. In the arcades, the sacred sits alongside the profane, the mundane accompanies the profound.

The author relishes these new experiences, which, in his time, are deeply alien. Formalised artistic cultures were being torn apart by war, industrial culture and the resulting social shifts, simply by witnessing the after-effects of conflict. Artistic practice was naturally responsive, turning itself upside-down and inside out — simply in order to reflect the effects of fascism (including resistance to it). Reality itself was the crucible of forward thinking during this transitional period; as Breton wrote, the simple image of upturned wagons in a ruined, deserted street, pocked with smoking craters was an example of the ‘new muses’ that artists of his generations strove for. Absolute disruption of the status quo in order to shape a new reality, which the artists, writers and musicians of the time reflected. For, as Otto Dix said, it is the responsibility of the artist to simply reflect reality, rather than impose a personal or social agenda.

Aragon’s arcades offer glimpses of the coming future, freed from any political association. He is ‘reflecting’ the future as he augurs it — wandering in wonder, between the triggered effect-systems, fertilised and set in motion by war.

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CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

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