Classics for French Language Learners: Le Petit Prince
by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Writer, poet, journalist and aviator, Antoine de Saint Exupéry has delighted and frustrated many an english student studying his novel at A Level French as they’ve tried to unravel the mystery of the Little Prince. A french classic, a must-read for french learners, this book is a great choice for beginners or intermediate French students due to its illustrations and chapters which are divided into sub-chapters to simplify the read.
Written by pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry while in America, Le Petit Prince was inspired by his experiences in the French Air Force. A simple story but with many layers. The wise little prince visits various planets, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss, dispensing lessons in life, hope and humanist values from which we could all learn.
Eighty years after his death in 1944, and the 80th anniversary of the Liberation, the landings and the Victory in which the author played an active part, this classic from Antoine de Saint Exupéry has not lost its charm.
Member of the Free France resistance movement, Saint Exupéry took off from Borgo in Corsica in July 1944 on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for the Allied landing in Provence, never to return.
In 1948, he was recognised as “Dead for France”, his name inscribed in the Panthéon, on the list of other writers who died in the field.
In 2004, sixty years after his disappearance, divers of the French Underwater Archaeological Department in Marseille deciphered four figures on the left wing of the wreckage of a plane resting 70m deep on the seabed off the coast of Marseille. They corresponded to Saint-Exupéry’s plane.
