Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
June 29, 1900 – July 31, 1944
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer and pilot. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was already a recognized and successful author during his lifetime and became a cult author of the post-war decades, although he saw himself more as a professional pilot who only wrote on the side. His fairytale story The Little Prince is one of the most successful books in the world with over 140 million copies sold.
De Saint-Exupéry was born on 29 June 1900 in Lyon, the third of five children and the first son of Jean-Marc de Saint Exupéry (1863–1904). He died when the boy was three years old. De Saint-Exupéry grew up in Lyon and on family estates in the south of France. In 1909, he and his younger brother were sent to a boarding school run by Jesuits in Le Mans. In July 1912, during the summer holidays in Ambérieu-en-Bugey, he was taken on a flight for the first time by the pilot and designer Gabriel Salvez-Wroblewski, to whom he had lied that he had his mother's permission to fly. He was fascinated by the flight. He and his brother spent their last years of high school (1915–17) at the Kollegium Heilig Kreuz, a boarding school of the Marianists, in Fribourg, Switzerland. After graduating from high school (Baccalauréat 1917), De Saint-Exupéry attended the preparatory classes (classes préparatoires) for the entrance exam (concours) of the École navale at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, because he wanted to become a naval officer. However, he was unsuccessful in the exam, failed twice in literature and did not receive any of the quota places. Another blow was the sudden death of his brother in 1917, who died as a result of pericarditis. This loss shook Antoine de Saint-Exupéry deeply.
De Saint-Exupéry studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris from 1920 to 1921, but did not graduate.
From 1921 to 1923 he completed his military service with the cavalry in Strasbourg and was trained as an aircraft mechanic. The army refused to train him as a pilot because he had not completed the preparatory course for it. Saint-Exupéry completed his pilot training by taking private flying lessons. After that, De Saint-Exupéry could have remained in the Air Force as a career officer and pilot, but the aristocratic family of his fiancée Louise de Vilmorin, the sister of a Parisian classmate, was vehemently opposed to such a dangerous existence for their future son-in-law. In anticipation of the marriage, which did not take place, Saint-Exupéry worked as an employee for Parisian companies. He also flew whenever he could and had his first contacts with Parisian writers in the salon of a noble aunt, Yvonne de Lestrange, Duchess of Trieste.
In 1923, Saint-Exupéry was completely penniless and began working as a pilot for the first time, taking tourists on fifteen-minute sightseeing flights over Paris. In 1925 he first emerged as an author with the novella L'Aviateur ("The Aviator").
In 1926, De Saint-Exupéry was hired by the air cargo company Latécoère in Toulouse, initially as a ground staff. He soon joined the pilots and initially flew the Toulouse–Casablanca stage, then Casablanca–Dakar. In 1927/28 he was head of the lonely intermediate airfield on Cabo Juby for 18 months with the main town of Tarfaya, which belonged to the then colony of Spanish Morocco, where a monument commemorates him. In his function as airport manager, he often had problems with the warlike Berbers of the area. Several times he also had to rescue colleagues who had made an emergency landing in the desert. In 1930, for rescuing a total of 14 pilots, he was awarded the highest order in France that is awarded to civilians, the "Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur". Most of his time, however, was spent waiting for the next plane. It was here that he wrote his first longer text, the small novel Courrier Sud ("Südkurier", 1928), which tells the last flight of a pilot including an interpolated, equally sad love story.
In 1929, Saint-Exupéry completed further training in navigation with the naval aviators in Brest and then went to Argentina for his company to set up airmail and air freight lines in what was then the richest country in South America. He processed his experiences and experiences as the person responsible for the first night flights, which were carried out dutifully despite all the dangers, in the novel Vol de nuit ("Night Flight", December 1930), the plot of which revolves around the fatal last flight of a pilot. The work was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina and brought Saint-Exupéry his breakthrough as an author.
In April 1931, he married Consuelo Suncín Sandoval, a young widowed painter from El Salvador. The civil wedding took place in Nice, the church wedding was celebrated by the couple in Agay, where the Saint-Exupéry family had a country estate.
De Saint-Exupéry then went back to West Africa, partly as a cross-country pilot, partly as a test pilot for seaplanes (where he almost drowned once). In 1934, he was hired by the new Air France, which had merged several airlines.
Over the next few years, he led a mixed existence as an aviator, advertising officer, journalist and author. For example, in 1934 he flew to Saigon (then the capital of the then French colony of Vietnam) and in 1935 undertook a lecture tour around the Mediterranean by plane. In May 1935, when the French and Soviet governments had just concluded a mutual assistance pact against the German Reich, he visited Moscow on behalf of the newspaper Paris-Soir and wrote a much-noticed series of articles about his stay.
On 29 December 1935, De Saint-Exupéry crashed 200 kilometres from Cairo in the Egyptian desert while trying to set the Paris–Saigon course record, after touching the ground in poor visibility. Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic Prévot survived the crash landing unharmed, but were now exposed to the sun and heat of the desert without a sufficient supply of drinking water. After a five-day march through the desert, they came across a caravan and were rescued.
In the spring of 1937, De Saint-Exupéry spent a month as a reporter for Paris-Soir in Spain during the Civil War, which he described from the Republican side (which was half-heartedly supported by the new French Popular Front government).
In mid-February 1938, De Saint-Exupéry attempted a record-breaking flight from New York to Tierra del Fuego (southern Argentina), but crashed in Guatemala after a stopover and was seriously injured. During his convalescence, he compiled the anthology Terre des hommes ("The Earth of the People" in New York), whose texts, some of which are new and some of which are older, sing above all a hymn of camaraderie among men, the fulfillment of duty and idealism, as well as solidarity and humanity. When it was published at the beginning of 1939, the work struck a chord with the times and was a great success. It received the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française; the American translation under the title Wind, Sand and Stars also sold excellently and won awards. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had just returned from a trip to his American publisher when the Second World War broke out in early September 1939. He was drafted and initially served as an instructor for pilots. Later, he himself became a pilot in a reconnaissance squadron and in May/June 1940 witnessed how northeastern France sank into chaos after the German attack, the "blitz allemand". He experienced the armistice on 25 June and the subsequent demobilisation of the French armed forces in Algeria, after which he first stayed on the estate of a sister in Agay/southern France. Here he wrote a larger philosophical-moralistic, lyrical-narrative work that he had already begun in 1936: Citadelle (German title The City in the Desert), the fragment of which was only published posthumously. At the end of 1940, De Saint Exupéry travelled via Morocco and neutral Portugal to the USA, where his American authors' fees had accumulated. However, he did not feel comfortable in New York because he had problems with the French there, who – unlike him – mostly sympathized with Marshal Pétain and his newly established right-wing authoritarian regime. During his time in the United States, he changed his family name from Saint Exupéry to Saint-Exupéry. During a longer visit to California, where the exiled director Jean Renoir wanted to film his work Terre des hommes in 1941, Saint-Exupéry wrote the work Pilote de guerre ("War Pilots") ("Flight to Arras"), which dealt with his war experiences. It was first published in 1942 in an American translation (Flight to Arras), as well as in the French original under the title Pilote de Guerre. The book was also initially allowed to be published in France. The German censors only prevented a partial sentence in which Hitler was named. After the press had dealt with the work extensively, it was put on the index by the Germans. Nevertheless, the book continued to circulate underground.
At the beginning of 1943, De Saint-Exupéry published two shorter texts in New York: Lettre à un otage ("Letter to a Hostage") and Le petit prince (The Little Prince). The Lettre is a fictitious letter to a Jewish friend with lyrical, essayistic and narrative passages, through which Saint-Exupéry tried to call on the French all over the world to show solidarity with France, which had just been completely occupied by German troops (11 November 1942). Le petit prince, which was to become his best-known text in the long term (to date, the work has been translated into over 140 languages worldwide), is a fairytale-like tale about a plane who has made an emergency landing in the desert and meets a little boy who has ended up on earth from an asteroid. The text, which mixes real and surreal elements, reads as a desperate confrontation of the author with the oppressive situation of gagged France, his discomfort in utilitarian America and, last but not least, his guilty conscience towards his wife left behind in France – the "rose" of the "Little Prince". Today, Le petit prince is commemorated by a fountain monument in the southern French town of Agay, which bears a key sentence from the booklet. In 1943, De Saint-Exupéry was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In May 1943, Saint-Exupéry went to Algeria, which was now controlled by Anglo-American troops, and became a pilot in the air force again. However, his flying skills had suffered after the long break. When he crash-landed in July on his return from one of his first flights, he was retired, citing his age and various injuries.
His relations with the supporters of the head of the "Free French Armed Forces", Charles de Gaulle, were marked by mutual distrust during this time. Saint-Exupéry resented the Gaullists for being fixated on the seizure of power. He assumed that they would carry out an overly strict purge (épuration), which he considered counterproductive. De Saint-Exupéry then dealt with technical problems with the new jet engines in Algiers (he already had several aeronautical patents), but also continued to write to Citadelle. Thanks to his fame, he managed to be reactivated for a limited number of reconnaissance flights. He undertook this first from Sardinia, which was now occupied by the Americans, then from reconquered Corsica.
On the morning of July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off from Bastia Airport for his last reconnaissance flight in a Lockheed F-5 (registration number 42-68223) in the direction of Grenoble, but did not return and has been missing ever since. Various possibilities were considered as the cause of his disappearance: shooting down, technical defect, but also suicide, because this flight was not to be followed by others and Saint-Exupéry was severely depressed, as letters from this time prove.
In 1948, Hermann Korth, a pastor from Aachen, wrote to Saint-Exupéry's publisher Gaston Gallimard that a war diary for July 31, 1944 contained the entry: "Call Tribune Kant Launch I Reconnaissance Burning Over Sea. Reconnaissance Ajaccio unchanged."