It’s not just a phenomenon. It’s a mystery. Most people know the timeless line from The Little Prince, ‘If you please, draw me a sheep!’ You may be moved by it or irritated, but either way, you probably recognise it. And whether you know the book intimately or only vaguely, in the past 80 years it’s become part of the collective imagination. The world changes; The Little Prince stays the same.

Inevitably, one wonders why. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a prize-winning writer and decorated pilot, had been in New York since late 1940; there, in 1942, he published Flight to Arras, which was a major success. Then, in 1943 he brought out a short book illustrated with his own watercolours, a tale for the young and the young at heart. He dedicated The Little Prince to his writer friend Léon Werth – or rather to Werth ‘when he was a little boy’.

In 1944, after going to North Africa to resume service with the Free French Air Force, Saint-Exupéry disappeared during a reconnaissance mission – and entered legend. In the book, an aviator stranded in the desert describes meeting a child-visitor from a distant asteroid. This child – the Little Prince, the sovereign and sole inhabitant of his universe – has left to put some distance between him and the capricious rose he loves. He has travelled and met the inhabitants of other planets. Having reached Earth, he talks with a fox, whom he befriends, and with a snake. He spends a long time with the aviator, then decides to return home by allowing himself to be bitten by the snake.

The story is told with deliberately childlike simplicity, though at times it slips into a certain poetic grandiloquence. The observations are often sententious and ostentatiously freighted with wisdom; and the golden-haired child in the golden scarf is celebrated repeatedly – even rather obsessively – and his spontaneity, innocence and authenticity contrasted with the foolishness of ‘grown-ups’. From (…)

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(1) Morgane Fert Malka, Mes instructions viennent de plus haut: La vérité sur l’explosion de Nord Stream (My instructions come from higher up: the truth about the Nord Stream explosion), Stock, Paris, 2025; see also Fabian Scheidler, ‘Nord Stream: hide-and-seek deep under the Baltic sea’, Le Monde diplomatique English edition, November 2024.

(4) Morgane Fert Malka, ‘Nord Stream saga: inside the Sberbank Switzerland sale’, Intelligence Online, 31 January 2025