Lot n° 128
Estimation :
10000 - 12000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 16 475EUR
SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944) aviateur et ecrivain. - Lot 128
SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944) aviateur et ecrivain.
Autograph MANUSCRIT, [Letter to the French, 1942]; 31 leaves in-4 written on the front in black ink on Esleeck Fidelity Onion Skin watermarked American paper.
First unpublished version of the Lettre aux Français calling on the French to unite to save France. [Saint-Exupéry, exiled in the United States, found himself in a delicate situation: he did not want to choose between Vichy and De Gaulle, while at the same time wanting to fight Nazism and Hitler's Germany. Choosing De Gaulle was difficult for him, as the General was not recognized by the American government. After the occupation of the "free zone" on November 11, 1942, wanting to bring together the French living in the U.S.A. and to convince America to intervene in the war, he wrote an appeal to the French for an address broadcast on November 29, 1942 on American stations broadcasting in French and widely reproduced in the press, collected in Un sens à la vie, now edited under the title Lettre aux Français (Pléiade, t. II, p. 69-73)].
This text is a first draft, with erasures, corrections and marginal additions, with discontinuous pagination, of the Lettre aux Français, very different from the final text. We will quote here only brief excerpts. "Frenchmen of my country, I have long refused to address you. [...] I feel French. France is not one. I am not France. I am from France. [...] This war, Frenchmen, we had the honor to engage it against the reason of the logicians. We thought it was high time to stand up against Nazism. We were the advanced sentinel. We looked around and saw nothing to fall back on. [...] The problems that weigh on our generation are inextricably contradictory. An era without clear boundaries. But the border passes through the nation. Sometimes through the family. Always through the man. [...] Everything could crack if our border cracked. [...] We carry on our shoulders a heavier weight than 1914. [...] Certainly we were against the armistice. It was a soldiers' ritual, we were not responsible for this France with an open belly and which spread its entrails on the congested roads. [...] Once the armistice was requested, we emigrated to North Africa. I flew in a four-engine Farman plane on the Bordeaux airfield. I took on board young pilots recruited by two of my comrades and friends, at random from our nightly walks. We landed our cargo in Algiers. We thought we would continue the war. But the armistice was concluded. The Armistice was valid for North Africa [...] We thought that Vichy had a function. [...] this provisional structure represented nothing of the real country". However, it was able to avoid a massive departure of men to German camps, which would have been imposed by a German administration... "I do not give credit for this miracle to this or that person. I give credit to the obscure French conscience spread through the offices, the offices, the main or secondary command posts, and which expressed itself through the channels offered, crises or resistance or threats - insofar as certain countries such as North Africa allowed us threats - succeeded with a kind of organic genius in saving something of France and in refusing something to the invader. The term of the Armistice was for him a fatal error because believing in the immediate surrender of England and in the legend of a HITLER hypnotizing the world with the genius of Satanism and taking in his hands the control of the planet without having had to spill German blood (and this seems to me to be capital), Germany granted France an advantage whose effects would have been reduced by themselves in the case of a rapid and total victory. But Vichy held "only phantom pledges"... Etc. Provenance : Nelly de VOGÜÉ (Drouot sale 27 November 1990, n° 258) ; Bibliothèque Dominique de VILLEPIN, Feux & Flammes, I Les Voleurs de feu (28 November 2013, n° 154).
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