Pilote de guerre

“I will fight anyone who claims to subordinate the freedom of man to a single individual — or to a mass of individuals.” Before returning to the fight in which he would lose his life, Saint-Exupéry, demobilized after the “drôle de guerre,” took refuge in the United States, and it was in New York that he wrote these lines. This edition, published in February 1942, is also the first complete edition, since it includes (p. 34) the seven words of a sentence in which the author collectively calls his orderly, a high-ranking staff officer and Hitler — “who unleashed this insane war” — “imbeciles,” a passage that French censorship would force to be removed from the Gallimard edition of December 1942. But this granted the book only a brief reprieve, since in early 1943 the German authorities, alerted by two outraged articles in Je suis partout, banned the work. This censorship gave rise to the two clandestine editions published by Gaston Riby in late 1943 and early 1944.

The text first appeared in pre-original form, in English, in January 1942 in the Atlantic Monthly, then in book form the following month: the work would top the bestseller lists for six months. “This book is a great and beautiful book, perhaps the true book of the war of 1939,” wrote Pierre Mac Orlan in Les Nouveaux Temps on 8 January 1943.