Léon Werth (1878, Remiremont, Vosges - 1955) was a French writer and art critic, a friend of Octave Mirbeau, then of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Léon Werth wrote critically and with great precision on French society through World War I, colonization, and on French "collaboration" during World War II.
Saint-Exupéry met Werth in 1931. He soon became Saint-Exupery's closest friend outside of his flying group of Aeropostale. Werth did not have much in common with Saint-Exupéry; he was an anarchist, his father was a Jew, and a left Bolshevik supporter. Being twenty-two years older than Saint-Exupéry, with a surrealistic writing style as well as the author of twelve volumes and many magazine pieces, he was Saint-Exupéry's very opposite.
Saint-Exupéry dedicated two books to him, ("Letter to a Hostage" and "The Little Prince"), and referred to Werth in three more. At the beginning of World War II, while writing "The Little Prince", Saint-Exupéry lived in his downtown New York City apartment, thinking about his native France and his friends. Léon Werth spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, his village in the Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he "was alone, cold and hungry", and had few nice words on French refugees. Saint-Exupéry returned to Europe in early 1943, rationalizing, "I cannot bear to be far from those who are hungry... I am leaving in order to suffer and thereby be united with those who are dear to me."
At the end of World War II, which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry didn't live to see, Léon Werth said: "Peace, without Tonio (Saint-Exupéry) isn't entirely peace." Leon Werth did not see the text for which he was so responsible until five months after his friend's death, when Gallimard sent him a special edition.
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To Leon Werth
I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:
To Leon Werth, When he was a little boy
in italic, title's translation
"L'insoumis - Léon Werth" by Gilles Heuré.
In French