Lettre aux Américains

A reflection on America’s commitment to liberating France, this is the last known text written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, composed during the night of 29–30 May 1944, in Sardinia: “… It may be that the sense of your material power will lead you, today or tomorrow, to take advantages that will seem to us unjustly harmful. It may be that discussions, more or less serious, will one day arise between you and us… Well, even if one day I harbor in my heart some reproaches against the decisions of those in charge, these reproaches will never make me forget the nobility of your people’s war aims.”

Saint-Exupéry had promised this text to Life journalist and photographer John Phillips: “I will give you a text if you manage to get me reinstated in my squadron.” He kept his word, and Phillips followed him from Algiers to the base in Sardinia, where the writer-aviator had rejoined Gavoille’s squadron. On the eve of Phillips’s departure, 30 May 1944, the two men spent the night together: Saint-Exupéry wrote the Lettre à un américain [its original title] and, in the early morning, gave his friend the manuscript so that he might have it published. Phillips captured the scene with his camera. Two months later, on 31 July 1944, the writer-pilot disappeared at sea.

Devastated, the Life journalist published neither the Lettre à un américain nor his reportage. “Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance was a terrible shock to John Phillips, who put all the images away. Forty years later, I devoted much effort to persuading him to bring them back for a book and a traveling exhibition, which even returned to the Alghero airfield, where it had all begun in the exultation of finally recovering the controls, and to Bastia, where the adventure was tragically cut short.” (Ch.-Henri Favrod, Le Temps, 11 May 2001).

This text, the last Saint-Exupéry ever wrote, was not published until 1959, in this limited edition issued by Pierre Aeberts, in 51 copies. The Pléiade edition (OC, II, notes, p. 1394) states, mistakenly, that the first publication only appeared in 1973, in the magazine Air France toujours (no. 1, first quarter 1973), before being reprinted in 1981 in issue no. 96 of the magazine Icare.

The first eleven copies on vergé de Hollande paper are of great rarity.

From the library of Pierre Puech (Paris, Alde, II, 2010, no. 370).