This text is part of the special book Plaisirs
A new museum devoted to the history of aviation in the pink city retraces the incredible epic of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his fellow airmail pilots. They wrote just a century ago, from Toulouse, one of the most inspiring pages in the great book of human adventure.
On December 25, 1918, Pierre-Georges Latécoère took off from Toulouse-Montaudran aerodrome aboard a Salmson 2A2 and landed safe and sound in Barcelona two and a half hours later. He has thus just created the first French airmail line. After having built more than 800 military planes in Toulouse during the First World War, he now has the desire to create a commercial airline. Latécoère believes that the fruit is ripe for developing lines that would link France to its colonies. Thus, he wants to connect Toulouse to Dakar, via Barcelona and Casablanca. This is unheard of. Navigation techniques are still rudimentary and the risks are enormous. But the pilots he approaches, reckless and daredevils, are ready to risk their lives to bring goods and precious letters to safety.
Flying over seas and deserts, avoiding mountains and lightning, facing storms and headwinds, these pioneers will forever mark the collective imagination with their courage and virtuosity. The most famous of them have found their way into the history books: Jean Mermoz, Henri Guillaumet, as well as the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
He immortalized this epic in novels that are still widely read today: Courier South, night flight, Terre des hommes and Pilot of war. All his work draws his inspiration from this heroic profession that he practiced until his death, and which will make Umberto Eco say that it is now difficult to know “if he stole to write or if he wrote to steal”. .
The writer-aviator
Fascinated by airplanes since childhood, Saint-Exupéry learned to fly one at the age of 21, during his military service in 1921. Intoxicated by the speed and danger, he joined the Compagnie Générale d’Air in 1926. aeronautical company, managed by Latécoère. He becomes a regular aviator on the Toulouse-Casablanca-Dakar line. The following year, in 1927, Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont bought the company, which he renamed Compagnie Générale Aéropostale. It was then that Saint-Exupéry was appointed head of the airfield at Cap Juby in Morocco (today Tarfaya), a strategic stage on the line linking Casablanca to Dakar.
He lived there for two years in an isolated fort located between the desert and the ocean, near a runway where the company’s planes landed once a week. He is responsible for rescuing pilots lost in the vastness of the desert and negotiating with Berber leaders for the release of those who have been taken hostage. He thus makes perilous landings in the middle of the dunes to recover comrades, comes under fire from rebel tribes that he flies over in search of a lost plane and saves several airmen from their clutches.
This stay in the Moroccan desert leaves him a lot of free time, which he fills by writing his first novel, Courier South, who will be greatly inspired by his experiences there. The legend says that it was this period spent in the Sahara that also inspired large parts of his tale. The little Prince, the most widely read, translated and best-selling book in the world after the Bible. Thus, the fennec fox that he then tamed would become, years later, the character of the fox who would utter one of the most famous lines in French literature: “You only see well with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye. »
Saint-Exupéry will continue to explore new territories for years. He will drive at the risk of his life in Argentina, Brazil, France and Indochina. Writer celebrated almost everywhere on the planet from the publication of his first novel in 1929, he nevertheless never lost his passion for aviation and his ardent desire to fly.
Wanting more than anything to serve his country during the Second World War, the writer-soldier joined on May 5, 1943, in Laghouat, Algeria, an allied aerial photographic reconnaissance group commanded by Americans. The devices they use, Lockheed Lightning P38s, fly at 650 km/h and climb to more than 13,000 meters in altitude. The rule put in place stipulates that they can only be piloted by airmen under 30 years of age.
Aged 42, Saint-Exupéry, stubborn as a mule, still managed, helped by his fame, to obtain an exemption. After more than a year of military flights carried out with brio, he took his place on July 31, 1944, in his plane number 223. He took off at 8:35 a.m. from the Borgo base, in Corsica, for a reconnaissance mission over above the region of Grenoble and Annecy, in order to prepare for the landing in Provence. He will never come back. His plane will crash into the Mediterranean. It will only be found 60 years later, in 2004, off the coast of Marseille.
Toulouse and Saint-Exupéry
The shadow of the author Little Prince looms everywhere in Toulouse, the starting point for all the airmen who took part in this incredible epic that was airmail. The headquarters of these discoverers of the XXe century still exists and is located at 8-10, rue Romiguières.
It is in this old red brick boarding house, since transformed into a hotel, that the pilots and mechanics lived who had to travel to the four corners of the world to carry out their mission: to deliver the mail. Saint-Exupéry was still staying in room number 32, located at 3e floor, whose balcony is easily visible from the outside and which offers a magnificent view of the Place du Capitole, the largest in the city. Although the room has been completely renovated since his visit – only the sink and the entrance door are original – it remains particularly popular with admirers of the author.
A new museum dedicated to the city’s aviation history, L’Envol des pioneers, opened its doors two years ago. Located on the very spot where the long runways stretched from where the first planes of the Latécoère company took off, this interactive museum tells the story of civil aviation, airmail, Air France as well as Airbus.
You will thus understand how the friendly pink city has become, in just a few decades, the European capital of aviation and aerospace, transmitting to a new generation dreams of exploration and surpassing oneself.
The author was the guest of Atout France and the Regional Tourism Committee of Occitanie.