Pilote de guerre

“I will fight anyone who claims to subject the freedom of man — as of a mass of men — to a single individual.” Before returning to the fight in which he would lose his life, Saint-Exupéry, demobilized after the “Phoney War,” 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: it retains (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 French censorship would demand be removed from the Gallimard edition of December 1942. This reprieve was short-lived: in early 1943, German authorities, alerted by two outraged articles in Je suis partout, banned the book outright. This censorship led to the two clandestine editions published by Gaston Riby in late 1943 and early 1944.

The text first appeared, in English, in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1942, then in book form the following month: it topped the best-seller 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.

A very fine copy bound in red morocco by Semet et Plumelle.

A choice copy, from the impeccable library of Marcel de Merre (Paris, Sotheby’s, 2007, no. 426), with bookplate.