Photographic portrait of Saint-Exupéry

Base at Alghero, Sardinia, [30 May 1944].
Original silver print (90 x 122 mm), black & white, mention of the photographer John Philips on the back, in graphite: ‘The last days of St. Ex, 1944, July’, with ‘Original. Offered by General Gavoille René’ on the cropping layer.

Photograph of Saint-Exupéry writing his last lines.

Provenance: John Philips, René Gavoille.

Enclosed: the original large-format edition of the biography of Saint-Exupéry by M. Migeo (Flammarion, 1958) and the catalogue of the report by John Phillips featuring this original photograph, Les derniers jours de Saint-Exupéry (Musée de l’Elysée de Lausanne).

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

In May 1943, after lengthy procedures and the intervention of friends and family, Saint-Exupéry was reassigned to the army. The Little Prince was in the process of being printed and not yet distributed when he immediately joined the allied forces in Algiers for his first missions. But at high altitude, Saint-Exupéry consumed too much oxygen and, dizzy, missed a landing in July. He was then grounded and not allowed to go on a mission again. The command considered it too risky.

His friend and captain of the 2/33 squadron, René Gavoille, had already been posted to Sardinia and Saint-Exupéry had only one desire: to join him. The two men met at the Orconte airbase in the Marne. Gavoille, ‘one of the classiest guys I know’, was his instructor before becoming his friend.

That same summer, John Phillips, born in Algeria to a Welsh father and an American mother, arrived in Algiers. A photographer and journalist at Life, he was familiar with the Aeropostale lines in Latin America before the war and an admirer of the work of Saint-Exupéry, whom he had discovered in New York. He immediately set off to meet him and learned that he was no longer considered fit for high-altitude missions. He therefore never stopped pleading for his reinstatement, even going to the high headquarters in Naples to obtain it, throwing all his weight behind the effort to convince the command. Saint-Exupéry was already grateful to him: ‘I will give you a text if you manage to get me reinstated in my group’ (in OEuvres complètes, La Pléiade, notes et variantes).

The American general Eaker, commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, granted him this authorisation in the spring of 1944: he gave him the opportunity to be a pilot at the controls of an unarmed aeroplane, for a limited number of observation missions over France (five sorties were planned, but there would be nine). He also agreed that it would be within Gavoille’s 2/33 group in Sardinia, where he would immediately convoy Phillips for a report.

The latter’s obstinacy – which he would later regret – sealed the friendship between the two men.

On 10 May, they arrived together in Alghero, Sardinia, on board a B26. From that day until 30 May 1944, John Phillips produced a report on the squadron: 14 contact sheets for 165 photographs, about twenty of which were of Saint-Exupéry. This report was not published until 1989, in Les Derniers jours de Saint-Exupéry, thanks to Charles-Henri Favrod and following the exhibition devoted to John Phillips in April 1989 at the Musée de l’Elysée, which Favrod directed in Lausanne.

Phillips had to leave the base on 30 May. He and Saint-Exupéry spent the previous night together: it was the night Saint-Exupéry was to write the Letter to an American, in which he expressed his pessimism about the future and delivered a kind of disillusioned testament.

In the early morning, he offered his manuscript – a first draft of six pages, written in one go – to John Phillips, for his departure and for him to have it published: the photograph we present here shows him writing this text, which expresses his view of the Americans, to whom he owes so much. Saint-Exupéry and the 2/33 group left Sardinia in mid-July for the base at Borgo, in Corsica. It was there that, on 24 July 1944, the son of René Gavoille, Christian, was baptised in the presence of Saint-Exupéry, who was his godfather. A week later, he took off in the early morning of 31 July 1944. On that day, Gavoille knew something that Saint-Exupéry did not: it was the last time he would fly a P38 Lightning. Commander Gavoille had found a stratagem to safeguard the future of the already legendary Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was now part of the family circle: he was going to inform him of the plans for the imminent landing in Provence. This classified information would have prevented Saint-Exupéry from taking off again. But this announcement never took place: Saint-Exupéry never returned from his mission.

The Life journalist, devastated by the news, published neither the Letter to an American nor his report. ‘The disappearance came as a terrible shock to John Phillips, who put all the images into hibernation. Forty years later, I put a lot of energy into persuading him to use them for a book and a travelling exhibition that even returned to the Alghero airfield, where it had all begun in the elation of finally regaining control, and to Bastia, where the adventure tragically ended’. (Ch.-Henri Favrod, Le Temps, 11 May 2001).

The text, meanwhile – the last one written by Saint-Exupéry – was not published until 1959, in a confidential edition published in Liège by Pierre Aeberts, in his Dynamo editions, in 51 copies. La Pléiade (OC, II, notes) mistakenly states that the first publication did not occur until 1973 in the magazine Air France toujours (no. 1, first quarter of 1973), before being reprinted in 1981 in issue no. 96 of the magazine Icare. The six pages of the original manuscript were ultimately donated by John Phillips to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1984, where they are now part of the Nadia Boulanger Saint-Exupéry collection.

The photograph – the only one taken early on in the reporting – was published for the first time, on loan from John Phillips, in the first biography of Saint-Exupéry, written by Marcel Migeo in 1958, published by Flammarion. The photograph appears on p. 223, uncredited, with this probably deliberately imprecise caption: ‘Between raids, he works on one of his books’. It then appeared in several other books paying tribute to the writer-aviator and has since become one of the most famous portraits of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The photographer offered this precious print to René Gavoille on an unknown date, and it was kept for several decades in his copy of Pilote de guerre, which kept a record of it. He would extract the photograph to donate it, in 1989, during the Lausanne exhibition, to a devotee of Saint-Exupéry’s work who owned the text of La Lettre aux américains in its original 1959 edition: one of the 11 Deluxe Hollandais copies.