Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944)
Life
Saint-Exupéry was born into a minor aristocratic family in Lyon, failed the naval academy entrance exam, and stumbled sideways into aviation during his military service. That accident set the rest of his life. In the 1920s he flew mail routes for Latécoère — later Aéropostale — across the Sahara and then across the Andes, at a time when airmail pilots had a job expectancy measured in flights, not years. The planes were unreliable, the navigation was by landmark and dead reckoning, and pilots routinely went down in the desert and had to walk home or die. Saint-Ex himself crashed half a dozen times. Once, in 1935, he went down in the Libyan desert during a Paris-to-Saigon record attempt, wandered with his mechanic for four days with almost no water, and was rescued by a Bedouin who poured water into their mouths drop by drop. That episode would seed The Little Prince six years later.
He wrote his books in the cockpit, in hotel rooms, on leave, in exile. Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars were based directly on his flying. When France fell in 1940, he went to America, wrote a furious little book about French defeat (Flight to Arras), and published The Little Prince in New York in 1943 in English and French simultaneously. He hated being stuck writing while his country was occupied. He wangled his way back into a reconnaissance squadron at forty-four, past the age limit, despite multiple old injuries that made him barely fit to fly. On 31 July 1944, he took off from Corsica on a reconnaissance mission over occupied France and never came back. Wreckage of his plane wasn’t found until 2000, off the coast of Marseille. A silver bracelet with his name and his wife’s engraved on it was found in a fishing net in 1998. Nobody knows if he was shot down, crashed mechanically, or chose not to come back.
What They Were Doing
Saint-Exupéry wrote out of the air. The perspective of his books — Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras, [[the-little-prince|The Little Prince]] — is literally that of a man looking down. From altitude, the things people care about on the ground go strange. A house is a lit window in miles of black. A farmer drowsing on his porch is a small immovable thing in a vast moving world. The businessman who “owns” the stars doesn’t own anything. The geographer who writes books about his planet has never been outside his office. The king whose subjects are a single rat has a kingdom.
What Saint-Ex was actually writing was a humanism — a stubborn, anti-abstract, anti-ideological humanism against the drift of twentieth-century politics. He hated Nazism, hated Stalinism, and wasn’t comfortable with the Free French, the Americans, or most of his own generation either. What he trusted was responsibility to the specific — the specific engine, the specific passenger, the specific friendship, the specific rose. “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux” — “One sees clearly only with the heart; what is essential is invisible to the eye” — is not a sentimental line, though it gets read that way. It’s an epistemological claim. The things that matter don’t show up in a sociology textbook or a party manifesto; they show up in how you actually treat the person in front of you.
The Little Prince reads like a fable for children, and it is, but it’s also one of the most direct attacks on adult modernity ever published. The adults in the book are all absurd — the king without subjects, the vain man who wants applause, the businessman counting stars he’ll never look at, the lamplighter turning a lamp on and off because it’s the rule. The child in the book is the one asking real questions. The desert and the pilot’s broken plane are real — Saint-Ex’s own desert — and the snake that bites at the end is a real snake and also something else. He wrote the book during the war, in exile, and died the year after finishing it.
Influence
The Little Prince is one of the most translated, most quoted, most tattooed books of the twentieth century — somewhere past 200 languages, over 200 million copies sold. That kind of penetration means the book has almost dissolved into the culture: people who haven’t read it can still cite “what is essential is invisible to the eye” or remember the rose. Within children’s literature, he opened the door for the philosophical children’s book — the line that runs through Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, Tomi Ungerer, later Shaun Tan. Within French letters, his direct inheritors are the novelists of the engagé humanist tradition: Camus, Malraux, Mauriac in his later mood.
Connections
- The Little Prince — the book everyone knows. Read it once as a child, again as an adult, and it’s a completely different book the second time.
- Man’s Search for Meaning — Frankl’s will-to-meaning is Saint-Ex’s philosophy restated as psychiatry. The fox’s “you become responsible forever for what you have tamed” is logotherapy’s ethical core, stated as a fable.
- Nausea — the opposite tack on the same problem. Roquentin in 1938 finds existence nauseating because it means nothing; Saint-Ex in 1943 finds it meaningful because you can love a specific rose. Both books emerge from the same French 1930s crisis; they point in opposite directions.
- Existentialism Is a Humanism — Sartre’s 1945 lecture arrives at a similar destination from different axioms: you are what you do for the people you take responsibility for. Saint-Ex got there two years earlier, through the fox.
- Escape from Freedom — Fromm’s diagnosis of the modern adult fleeing freedom into authority is exactly what The Little Prince’s “adults” do. The lamplighter obeying his orders is the Fromm automaton rendered as a cartoon.
Key Works
- The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943)
- Night Flight (Vol de nuit) (1931)
- Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes) (1939)
- Flight to Arras (Pilote de guerre) (1942)
- The Wisdom of the Sands (Citadelle) (1948, posthumous)