[Editor’s note: Read Wenzel’s Part 1 here.]
Because the pilot of the eponymous reconnaissance flight to Arras, Saint-Exupéry witnesses first-hand France’s utter defeat by the hands of Germany. The French military, unmotorized and outnumbered, confronted the Nazi Blitzkrieg of recent warfare coordinated amongst concentrated armored divisions, infantry, and a superior air drive (96-99). For Saint-Exupéry, the French defeat was inevitable (148-149). The inevitability is mirrored in his airplane, because the controls freeze at 30,000 toes – an issue that had been recognized earlier than the warfare, however was by no means resolved for need of particular person accountability (94). “We had been residing within the blind stomach of an administration. An administration is a machine. The extra good the machine, the extra human initiative is eradicated from it… However a machine is just not constructed for creation. It’s constructed for administration. It goes unvaryingly by means of motions pre-ordained as soon as and for at all times. And an administration, like a machine, doesn’t create. It carries on. It applies a given penalty to a given breach of guidelines, a given technique to a given purpose. An administration is just not conceived for the aim of fixing contemporary issues” (92-93).
The French military burned villages because it retreated – with no impact on the advancing Nazi military (96). This led to the notorious Exode, as thousands and thousands of French civilians (together with my grandmother, her sisters, and her mother and father) fled the advancing Nazis, in one of many three largest inhabitants actions in Western Europe within the twentieth century (117-139). From his vantage level, Saint-Exupéry might write: “I can see from my airplane the lengthy swarming highways, that interminable syrup flowing countless on the horizon.” Because the refugees transfer South, the native villages are pushed to capability: “Southward probably the most beneficiant hearts are starting little by little to harden on the sight of this mad invasion which little by little, like a sluggish river of mud, is starting to suffocate them.” (117). Naturally, the clogged roads contributed to the already restricted mobility of the French military.
Within the nice pressure between futility and responsibility, Saint-Exupéry displays on the warfare (certainly, a few of these reflections simmered throughout his American exile – however he additionally finds himself daydreaming on the stick). “I used to be later to listen to foreigners reproach France with the few bridges that weren’t blown up, the handful of village we didn’t burn, the lads who did not die. However right here on the scene, it’s the opposite, it’s precisely the opposite, that strikes me so powerfully. It’s our determined battle towards self-evident truth. We all know that nothing can do any good, but we blow up bridges however, as a way to play the sport. We burn down actual villages, as a way to play the sport. It’s as a way to play the sport that males die.” (99-100)
Saint-Exupéry – a French officer and a Frenchman – displays on the which means of the utter French defeat by the hands of the Blitzkrieg warfare machine. “Defeat not solely splits males off from different males, it creates a break up inside the particular person himself. If these apathetic fugitives don’t mourn the destiny of a collapsing France it’s just because they’re the defeated. It’s within the hearts of these males that France has been defeated. To weep for France is already the promise of victory” (146). He laments the defeat: “Tomorrow we of France enter into the night time of defeat. Could my nation nonetheless exist when day dawns once more. What ought we do to save lots of my nation? I have no idea. Contradictory issues. Our non secular heritage should be preserved, else our individuals will probably be disadvantaged of their genius. Our individuals should be preserved else our heritage will change into misplaced. For need of a method to reconcile heritage and other people of their formulation, logicians will probably be tempted to sacrifice both the physique or the soul. However I would like nothing to do with logicians. I would like my nation to exist each within the flesh and within the spirit when day dawns. Due to this fact I have to bear with all the burden of my love in that course.” (221-222). Curiously, for all his love of France, Saint-Exupéry doesn’t fall into the logical fallacy of the Hegelian nation-state; he stays a methodological individualist: “Man is just not the identical as males. We are saying nothing important in regards to the cathedral after we converse of its stones” (242). This conflicted, notably, with Charles de Gaulle’s imaginative and prescient of France as an entity, and its traditionally inevitable grandeur.
Flight to Arras was, surprisingly, controversial. Stacy Schiff, in her biography of Saint-Exupéry, explains how the ebook was denounced by each side, in turns as defeatist, patriotic with out social gathering affiliation, insufficiently anti-semite, or fascist (due to Saint-Exupéry’s methodological individualism, someway). After a short post-armistice keep in France, Saint-Exupéry exiled himself to New York for 28 sad however productive months – partially to get out of the Vichy warmth, however partially to drum up American assist for the warfare effort towards the Nazis (this was nonetheless yr earlier than Pearl Harbor). Saint-Exupéry had expressed issues about US isolationism in Arras: “For in spite of everything, why can we go on combating? For democracy? If we die for democracy, then we should be one of many democracies. Let the remaining battle with us, if that’s the case. However probably the most highly effective of them, the one democracy that would save us, chooses to bide its time. Excellent. That’s proper. However by so doing, that democracy signifies that we’re combating for ourselves alone” (154).
Saint-Exupéry arrived within the US able to encourage American assist for Western democracies towards the Nazis. However he quickly discovered himself in a nest of vipers, as he refused to take sides, between Vichy and Free France – but in addition, among the many totally different factions of the French resistance, most notably that led by Basic Charles de Gaulle in London. Saint-Exupéry particularly mistrusted de Gaulle, in whom he noticed the seeds of post-war authoritarianism. Ever the humanist, he sought to unify, somewhat than divide – the enemy was, in spite of everything, Nazi barbarism. “Since I’m one with the individuals of France, I shall by no means reject my individuals, no matter they could do. I shall by no means preach towards them within the listening to of others. At any time when it’s potential to take their defence, I shall defend them. In the event that they cowl me with disgrace I shall lock up that disgrace in my coronary heart and be silent. No matter at such time I shall consider them, I shall by no means bear witness towards them. Does a husband go from home to deal with crying out to his neighbors that his spouse is a strumpet? Is it thus that he can protect his honour? No, for his spouse is one with the house. No, for he can not set up his dignity towards her. Let him go dwelling to her, and there unburden himself of his anger.” He continues: “I shall not contribute to those divisions between Frenchmen by casting the accountability for the catastrophe upon these of my individuals who assume otherwise from me. The place there is no such thing as a choose, nothing is to be gained by hurling accusations. All Frenchmen had been defeated collectively.” This sentiment was mirrored in his well-known attraction for unity, his “Open Letter to Frenchmen All over the place,” revealed in The New York Instances on 29 November 1942. As a sidebar remark, the Instances would nonetheless publish such issues, and was not but a postmodern, woke, neo-Marxist mouthpiece.
Saint-Exupéry was reviled by all sides throughout his exile, simply as all sides tried to recruit him for his or her trigger. Stacy Schiff concludes that Saint-Exupéry “spoke too eloquently to be ignored however too softly to swimsuit anybody’s agenda” (367). He would spend 28 sad months in New York Metropolis, entertaining his hosts with parlor methods and water balloons thrown from the balcony of his condo – but in addition writing Arras, The Little Prince, and his final work, Citadel. When the US joined the European warfare effort in 1942, with Operation Torch and the invasion of North Africa, Saint-Exupéry rejoined the Free French forces as an remark pilot. He had to make use of his trademark guile and attraction to obtain flying clearance – he was, in spite of everything, 42, and his a number of flying accidents posed a danger. In late July 1944, he was grounded for one in all his frequent bouts of insubordination. However he broke the foundations on July 31, 1944, and flew solo for a reconnaissance mission over Southern France. He by no means returned.
Flight to Arras presents a vivid first-hand account of the Battle of France, and the executive roots of France’s defeat in six quick weeks. It additionally presents reflections on honor, craft, and futility. Saint-Exupéry was a feel-good author, a person of precept for divided instances (World Warfare Two, after all, however maybe a author who could possibly be rediscovered in these instances of division). Stacy Schiff concludes that his “work provides as much as solely an armful, a few of it dated, a lot of it flawed. However it’s all of it wealthy in spirit: it makes us wish to overreach ourselves. It makes us dream” (447).
Questions
Classical liberalism prizes individualism, and is skeptical of the collectivist, Hegelian, nation-state. And, but, there’s something about tradition, one thing about public orthodoxy, one thing about shared values – and, within the face of invasion and occupation by a tyrannical drive, one thing about preserving the nation and its liberties. The place is the steadiness between the person and a tradition (or maybe even a nation)?
World Warfare Two arguably began in 1938 (with the annexation of the Sudetenland) – or maybe with the 1937 invasion of China by the Japanese Empire. The US didn’t enter World Warfare Two till December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, and didn’t interact in formal European fight till Operation Torch in November 1942. Saint-Exupéry, in 1940 and all through his New York exile, lamented the shortage of US assist for “the Occident” towards the Nazi. What are the boundaries of isolationism? When do unhappy geopolitics change into a human proper, and trigger for intervention by international locations that might not in any other case have a canine within the battle? What classes could be discovered from World Warfare Two for right now’s world, particularly the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
For the historical past geeks solely. Saint-Exupéry wrote of the inevitability of the French defeat. This sentiment is just not shared by two key German generals, of their autobiographies (Misplaced Victories: The Warfare Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Sensible Basic, by Erich von Mannstein, and Panzer Chief, by Heinz Guderian); each generals feared the roughly equal numbers of troops, divisions, and tanks on both facet, within the Could 1940 invasion of France. In the long run, expertise and ways received the day for the Nazis. Was Saint-Exupéry too pessimistic? Or had been the German generals?
Nikolai G. Wenzel is the L.V. Hackley Chair for the Research of Capitalism and Free Enterprise, and Distinguished Professor of Economics, Broadwell School of Enterprise and Economics, Fayetteville State College (Fayetteville, NC).
