Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry, known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, journalist, and aviator born in Lyon on 29 June 1900. He came from an aristocratic Catholic family whose lineage reached back several centuries, but his childhood was marked by loss. His father, Viscount Jean de Saint-Exupéry, died before Antoine’s fourth birthday, leaving the family changed in status and circumstance. During World War I, his younger brother François died at age 15 while the two were at school in Fribourg, Switzerland. Saint-Exupéry later wrote of that death in imagery he would recast in the ending of The Little Prince.

As a young man, Saint-Exupéry did not follow a straight path. He twice failed his final exams at a preparatory Naval Academy, studied architecture for 15 months at the École des Beaux-Arts without graduating, and took odd jobs. In 1921 he began military service, took private flying lessons near Strasbourg, and later received his pilot’s wings after a posting to Casablanca, Morocco. After an early aircraft crash and pressure from the family of his fiancée, Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, he left the air force for office work. By 1926, however, he was back in the air, becoming one of the pioneers of international postal flight when planes had few instruments.

Flying shaped his books almost from the start. His first novella, The Aviator, appeared in 1926. Southern Mail, published in 1929, drew on his time flying the Casablanca-Dakar mail route. In 1931, Night Flight made him a rising literary figure and won the prix Femina; it reflected his experience as a mail pilot and as director of Aeroposta Argentina. He also worked for Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar, managed the Cape Juby airfield in South Morocco, negotiated the release of downed fliers held by Saharan tribes, and in 1930 received his first Légion d’honneur from the French Government.

Saint-Exupéry’s life moved between work, danger, and writing. In 1929 he was transferred to Argentina, where he directed Aeroposta Argentina, lived in Buenos Aires, surveyed new air routes across South America, negotiated agreements, flew mail, and joined search missions for missing fliers. In 1931 he married Consuelo Suncin, a Salvadoran writer and artist. Their marriage was described as rocky, and he left and returned to her many times. Between 1926 and 1939, four of his literary works were published: The Aviator, Southern Mail, Night Flight, and Wind, Sand and Stars.

World War II gave his last years a sharp public purpose. Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force and flew reconnaissance missions until France’s armistice with Germany in 1940. Demobilised, he lived in exile in the United States from 1941 to 1943 and helped persuade it to enter the war. During this period, Flight to Arras and The Little Prince were published. In 1943 he returned to combat with the Free French Air Force, despite being past the maximum age for a war pilot and in declining health. On 31 July 1944, during a reconnaissance mission over Corsica, his plane disappeared and is presumed to have crashed. Debris was found near Marseille in 2000, though the cause remains unknown. His words still carry the weight of lived experience: “A goal without a plan is just a wish” sounds like a pilot’s sentence, exact, practical, and hard won.