Antoine Saint-Exupéry: 125 years of a humanist message engraved in the heavens

Two great passions, writing and flying , guided the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , author of The Little Prince . His "humanist" message remains relevant on the 125th anniversary of his birth, which falls this Sunday, although, according to his family, he would have been uneasy about the similarity between today's world and the 1930s.

" He would be very sad because he would see that we have almost returned to his time, with the same problems. We haven't made much progress, and I think he would be very sad to see it," explains Olivier d'Agay, Saint-Exupéry's great-nephew, who died in 1944 while piloting an Allied plane in World War II.

D'Agay, director of the Saint-Exupéry estate, also believes that his great-uncle's feelings would be bittersweet upon seeing the "incredible success" of his The Little Prince of Asteroid B-612, which, with its 640 versions, is the most translated book in the world except for the Bible.

The fervor for his little novel would surprise him, his great-nephew ventures, since although he wrote "to speak to humanity," he was someone "very modest."

"I would be very happy to see that you didn't work for anything," he sums up.

Although the International Day of The Little Prince is celebrated every June 29 , Saint-Exupéry's successors have not planned anything concrete for this 125th birthday.

They've just celebrated the 80th anniversary of the publication of that iconic story in English (the original edition), next year will see its French equivalent, and in 2024, they also commemorated the 80th anniversary of the pilot and writer's disappearance.

But there is no need for anniversaries for the writer to be present all over the world, whether in museums – like the one that will open in November in the Swiss town of Solothurn with more than 10,000 books, records, tapes and documents of The Little Prince from the Jean-Marc Probst Foundation –, in the cinema , with films like Saint-Ex (2024), or in theaters , like in the Barcelona musical of The Little Prince .

Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon to an old noble family and lost his father, Jean, a former cavalry officer who later made a career in his father's insurance company, at just four years old.

His mother, Marie de Saint-Exupéry, taught him to read. She also introduced him to literature from a very young age, telling him and his four siblings stories and tales of saints before bedtime.

Later he would discover novelists such as Dostoevsky and the poetry of Baudelaire, as well as theatre.

His first literary attempts were short poems that he wrote while still in school , but his love for literature would run parallel to his other great passion: aviation.

His baptism in the skies, despite not having his mother's permission, would come at just 12 years old, when he accompanied the pilot Gabriel Wroblewki in a small plane during the summer holidays .

Already in military service, he officially became a pilot and later began transporting mail in the early days of commercial aviation . Based in Buenos Aires , he was responsible for organizing the South American routes of the French transatlantic airline Aéropostale.

"It was a completely incredible adventure, and people could die carrying the mail . It was also something out of the ordinary because was it really worth taking so many risks? Yes, for them it was very important. For him, it was very important because he had a mission in his soul to bring people together, to create bonds by transporting that mail," explains D'Agay.

As a pilot, he survived several serious accidents , but at the same time, he continued to write. He won the prestigious Femina Prize for Night Flight in 1930, and it was during that decade that he devoted himself most to writing, including journalism , until World War II, in which he served as a pilot.

With the Nazi occupation of France , he settled in New York and it was there that The Little Prince was first published on April 6, 1943, by the publishing house Reynal & Hitchcock.

It's a "magical" work, defines his great-nephew, which clearly demonstrates why Saint-Exupéry is a classic: it's a "humanist" book that still feels "very modern" because in it we find "many of the problems we still have today," such as wars, totalitarianism, and the fight to protect the planet.

Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the sea on July 31, 1944 , near Marseille, while piloting a P-38 Lightning on a reconnaissance mission. His armband and parts of the aircraft were recovered, and according to his family, the most likely hypothesis is that he was shot down by the Germans.