Saint-John Perse

Alexis Leger (French: [ləʒe]; 31 May 1887 – 20

September 1975), better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse
Saint-John Perse ([sɛ̃ d͜ʒɔn pɛʁs]; also Saint-Leger
Leger),[1] was a French poet, writer and diplomat,
awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the
soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry
which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of
our time" [2]

Early life
Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.
His great-grandfather, Prosper Louis Léger, a solicitor,
had settled in Guadeloupe in 1815.[3] His grandfather
and father were also solicitors; his father was also a
member of the city council.[3] The Leger family owned Perse in 1960
two plantations, one of coffee (La Joséphine) and the
Born Alexis Leger
other of sugar (Bois-Debout). St. Léger described his
31 May 1887
childhood on Guadeloupe as "the son of a family Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe
French as only the colonials are French".[4] Later on,
Died 20 September 1975
Léger greatly embellished his family origins by
(aged 88)
changing his surname to the more aristocratic sounding Giens Peninsula, Provence,
St Léger-Léger and by claiming that his ancestors were France
an ancienne noblesse family who had settled in
Pen name Saint-John Perse
Guadeloupe in the 17th century.[5] The Léger family
Occupation Poet, diplomat
were well off and Léger had a happy boyhood.[3] Léger
was closer to his warm and loving mother than his cold Alma mater University of Bordeaux
and distant father.[6] The French scholar Marie-Noëlle Notable Nobel Prize in Literature
awards 1960
Little wrote: "Growing up surrounded by the luxurious
fauna and flora of the West Indies, Alexis perhaps
could not but develop an interest in nature...".[6]

After the Spanish-American War that saw the United States annex Puerto Rico and occupy Cuba, rumors
were rampant in the French West Indies that the United States would seize the French colonies in the
Caribbean.[5] The year 1899, known as the "year of all dangers", was a period of racial tension on
Guadeloupe, with both blacks and whites committing arson in the belief that French rule would soon be
ending.[5] The Leger family returned to metropolitan France in 1899 and settled in Pau.[5] The young
Alexis felt like an expatriate and spent much of his time hiking, fencing, riding horses, and sailing in the
Atlantic. His best subjects as a student were the natural sciences.[6] St Léger always felt very close to
nature in general, and he had a special interest in ornithology as birds fascinated him.[6]
St. Léger had a strong sense of being an outsider in France and called himself a "man of the Atlantic"
who was equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic.[6] Throughout his life, St Léger had a preference
for islands and peninsulas over the mainland, which reflected his sense of being an outsider; his sense of
a Guadeloupan identity made him feel that he was very different from other French people.[6] He enrolled
at Lycée Louis-Barthou, passed the baccalauréat with honours, and began studying law at the University
of Bordeaux. As a university student, St Léger worked as the music critic for the Pau-Gazette.[5] When
his father died in 1907, the resulting strain on his family's finances led Leger to temporarily interrupt his
studies, but he eventually completed his degree in 1910.

In 1904, he met the poet Francis Jammes at Orthez, who became a

close friend. He frequented cultural clubs and met Paul Claudel,
Odilon Redon, Valery Larbaud, and André Gide.[7] He wrote short
poems inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe (Images à
Crusoe) and undertook a translation of Pindar. He published his
first book of poetry, Éloges, in 1910.[8] The Éloges (Praises)
reflected St. Léger's nostalgia for Guadeloupe.[6] The Éloges
concern a quest by the narrator for the "other shores", namely
outre-mer (a place beyond the sea) and outre-songe (a place
beyond dreams).[9] Much of the Éloges are concerned with the
lieux de mémoire ("sites of memory") that capture the memories of
a past world that no longer exists.[10] At one point, St Léger asks
in the Éloges: "Other than childhood, what was there in those days
that is here no longer?"[10] The tone in the Éloges is both dreamy Alexis Léger as a child in
and melancholic as the narrator reflects on his longing for the Guadeloupe, 1896 with his mother
plantation of his childhood, which is depicted as a paradise and his sisters.
lost.[11] The house that St. Léger grew up in is depicted in the
Éloges as a decaying ruin as his family's plantation is being
reclaimed by the jungle, while all of the books in the family library have rotted away.[12] The
autobiographical nature of the Éloges is underscored by a major character in the poems, an authoritarian
father who owned the plantation, depicted as having omniscient power over both his family and the
plantation.[13]

For St. Léger, only poetry endures and allowed him to recapture the memories of a lost world.[12] The
front page of the Éloges features the phrase in capital letters "ÉCRIT SUR LA PORTE" ("Written on the
door") and the first poem begins with a description of the door to the plantation house under which the
same phrase is written.[12] The door serves literally as an entrance to the house and metaphorically as the
entrance to the lost world of St Léger's childhood.[12] The chronotope of the Éloges is one where his
family's plantation exists in an idealized world severed from any sense of history, which reflected St
Léger's discomfort with the fact that his family owned slaves in the past (slavery was abolished in France
in 1848).[14] Several passages in the Éloges imply an incestuous relationship between the father and the
sister of the narrator, such as the line "a man is hard, his daughter tender"; the way that the sister displaces
her mother as the principal lady of the household; and references to a deeply shameful family secret that
the narrator cannot bring himself to name.[15]

The Éloges was almost completely ignored at the time; one of the few writers who paid it any attention
was Marcel Proust, who praised St. Léger as a creative young poet.[8] An early success for St Léger
occurred in 1912 when he, Larbaud, and Gide were elected to the John Donne Club of London, which
sought to encourage innovation in poetry.[16] During a visit to London to celebrate his election to the John
Donne Club, St. Léger met the Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad, which greatly encouraged him to
pursue a career in poetry.[16] Little wrote about his style: "The poet’s task, he thought, like the scientist's,
was to capture the universe and human consciousness while remaining outside of the literacy currents of
the time".[17]

Diplomatic service
In 1914, he joined the French diplomatic service, and spent some of his first years in Spain, Germany and
the United Kingdom. When World War I broke out, he was a press corps attaché for the government.

China: 1916–1921
From 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French embassy in Peking. He had a secret relationship with
Madame Dan Pao Tchao (née Nellie Yu Roung Ling), although according to the latter, he was just using
her for obtaining information from Peking high society.[18]

During his time in Beijing, he lived in a former Taoist temple and “sat with the philosophers and sages”
as he phrased it.[4] Using Beijing as his base, he took trips across the Gobi desert and out to France's
Pacific island colonies.[4] St. Léger was fascinated by the Gobi desert, writing to a friend in France that
these “desert expanses have exerted a hold on my thoughts, a fascination which approaches
hallucination.”[19] The American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote that in China St. Léger "learned the art
by which a man defends his life from others and even himself".[4] During his time in China, St. Léger
wrote his epic poem Anabase.[20] The Anabase ostensibly concerns an expedition from Beijing through
the Gobi desert to reach the sea, which serves as a metaphor, as Little phrased it, “an expedition beyond
human boundaries, symbolizing man’s march through time and space and consciousness.”[20] In a letter
to André Gide in 1921, he described Beijing as "the astronomical capital of the world, outside of space,
outside of time, and ruled by the absolute". [21]

When ordered to return to France, St. Léger took the longest and most convoluted route as he travelled
over the course of three months across the Yellow Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean in seven
different ships.[20] Shortly after his return to France, St. Léger was ordered to go to Washington D.C. to
attend the naval disarmament conference intended to end the naval arms race between the United States,
the United Kingdom, Japan, France, and Italy.[20] The conference was also intended to resolve the
Shandong question, as the Japanese had laid claim to the former German rights on the Shandong
peninsula, claims that were strongly resisted by China. As an expert on China, St. Léger was ordered by
his superiors to attend the conference as part of the French delegation.[20]

Secretary to Aristide Briand: 1921–32

In 1921 in Washington, DC, while taking part in a world disarmament conference, he was noticed by
Aristide Briand, Prime Minister of France, who recruited him as his assistant. In Paris, he got to know the
fellow intellectual poet Larbaud, who used his influence to get the poem Anabase published, written
during Leger's stay in China. Gide, who was serving as the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française,
visited St. Léger and asked him if he had any poems to publish.[22] St. Léger pointed to his trunk and
stated: "You may find something in there. Look".[22] Upon opening the trunk, Gide found the
Anabase.[22] Leger was warm to classical music and knew Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, and Les
Six. In Parisian intellectual and artistic circles, St. Léger was considered to be rising poet, and he
maintained a close friendship with Marcel Proust, whose work he in turn much admired.[23] As Proust
worked on the later volumes of his magnum opus À la recherche du temps perdu, St. Léger offered him
advice and encouragement.[23] Proust paid St. Léger a tribute in the fourth volume of À la recherche du
temps perdu, the ominously titled Sodom et Gomorrah, where two servants, Marie Gineste and Céleste
Albart, find the Éloges by St. Léger in the bedroom of the narrator.[8] After reading some of his poems,
Céleste states that St. Léger has written riddles instead of poems and tosses the book down in disgust.[22]
Despite the apparently unflattering nature of the scene, it was a tribute as the message was that only a
gifted few could really appreciate St. Léger's poetry.[22]

While in China, Leger had written his first extended poem Anabase, publishing it in 1924 under the
pseudonym "Saint-John Perse", which he employed for the rest of his life. He then published nothing for
two decades, not even a re-edition of his debut book, as he believed it inappropriate for a diplomat to
publish fiction. The Anabase was widely ignored upon publication, but was praised by various poets such
as T. S. Eliot, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke as a poem of much
visionary power.[22] Though St. Léger wrote only in French, the critical reception of his poems tended to
be more positive abroad than in France.[22] St. Léger's style of poetry, though modernist, was too
idiosyncratic to fit into the main currents of poetry in France at the time.[22]

In 1925, he became the chef de cabinet to Briand.[24] St. Léger wrote that Briand had "the boldness of the
dream...tempered...by the dictates of common sense" while having the ability to think quickly with the
"indifference to the exploitation of success".[24] St. Léger wrote Briand "had no need of duplicity or
violence to win...He hated equally stupidity, cowardice, clumsiness and vulgarity...He hunted with the
lightest arms and fished with the finest lines...He brought the refinement of the artist".[24] St. Léger
supported Briand's "Locarno policy" of seeking better relations with Germany.[20] As a senior aide to
Briand, St. Léger was involved in the talks that led to the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 and the Kellogg-
Briand Pact of 1928.[20] In 1930, St. Léger wrote up a memo for Briand that called upon him to use his
attendance at the next session of the League of Nations to speak for a "Federal European Union".[20] That
same year Eliot translated the Anabase into English, which first introduced St. Léger to an English-
speaking audience.[25]

Secretary-General of the French Foreign Office: 1932–1940

After Briand's death in 1932, Leger served as the General Secretary (number one civil servant) of the
French Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay) until 1940. St. Léger was a protégé of Philippe Berthelot, the long-
time Secretary-General all through the 1920s, and when Berthelot was forced to retire in the spring of
1932 due to ill health, St. Léger was his chosen successor.[26] Like Briand and Berthelot, St. Léger was in
the words of the French historian Marguerite Bastid-Bruguiere a strong believe in international "law and
justice" to be enforced by the League of Nations, which he saw as a forum where various international
problems could be resolved peacefully via negotiation.[26] Like his mentor Berthelot who also lived in
China, St. Léger was a Sinophile and had a strong interest in Chinese culture.[26] St. Léger's great hope as
secretary-general was to see the Soviet Union and the United States both join the League.[26] St. Léger
was described by the British historian D.C. Watt as the "cold genius" of the Quai d'Orsay, a brilliant
diplomat whose intelligence and ruthlessness made him invaluable to successive French foreign ministers
over an eight-year period.[27] Watt wrote that St. Léger was an excellent diplomat whose talents were
negated by the mostly mediocre foreign ministers he served, but that St. Léger promoted a talented cadre
of ambassadors that included René Massigli, Charles Corbin, Robert Coulondre, Émile Naggiar and
François Charles-Roux.[28] The American historian Elizabeth Cameron wrote: "From the start he was no
ordinary diplomat. He was a poet, and as a poet, lived in a world not much frequented by other diplomats.
But he was also capable of their world, experienced in many worlds, and not least in the worldly society
of the French capital. His courtesy was famous, though not always comfortable, and of a kind to put him
out of reach. Many and most of all the worldly and the ambitious, were made uneasy by his aloofness, the
subtleties of his language, and the sinuous progressions of his thought".[29] The British historian Julien
Jackson described St. Léger as a rather mysterious character whose most important belief was that France
could not afford to be estranged from Britain.[30] St. Léger had a dark complexion and a popular rumor
had it that he was of partially African descent, hence his nickname "le mulâtre du quai d’Orsay" ("the
mulatto of the Quai d'Orsay"), which he hated.[31]

The French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle described St. Léger as a "strange diplomat".[32] The
eccentric St. Leger was especially noted for his obsession with writing long erotic poems which
circulated as manuscripts among his friends celebrating the beauty and sensuality of women and the joys
of sex, on which he spent a disproportionate amount of time. The diplomat Jean Chauvel wrote that he
would appear at the Quai d'Orsay "wearing a narrow black tie, with a pasty face, a veiled look in his eyes,
using elegant and refined language in a low voice".[32] Chauvel described St. Léger as a dilettante who
talked about Chinese philosophy and poetry just as much as current events.[33] St. Léger normally arrived
at work at 11 am, would leave for lunch at noon and only return to the Quai d'Orsay at 4 pm.[33] Despite
his diplomatic duties, St. Léger was often at the Café Procope, where he spoke about the latest in the
cultural avant-garde with Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand, and Jean Giraudoux.[33] Morand wrote: "I admire
his modesty, his broad sweeping views, his elevated and active mind, his playful imagination and mature
wisdom like that of an elderly man, his selflessness, his secret life, his unfurnished apartments filled with
trunks and his nomadic childhood".[32] The columnist André Géraud who wrote under the penname
Pertinax wrote that: "He had a deep feeling for the dignity of France, something shared by all the great
servants of the State. He was a man of absolute moral and intellectual integrity...Contrary to the
accusations that are being leveled, Alexis Léger never took the liberty of trying to impose his own
views."[33] Géraud noted that St. Léger had difficult relations with some of the foreign ministers he
served, most notably Pierre Laval, Pierre-Étienne Flandin and especially Georges Bonnet, but that he saw
his duty to "educate" the ministers he served.[34]

The first great crisis faced by St. Léger as secretary-general was the Lytton Report, which had concluded
that Japan had committed aggression by seizing Manchuria from China in 1931.[26] In 1931, the Chinese
delegation at the League of Nations had accused Japan of aggression by conquering Manchuria, which
led the League to appoint a commission under Lord Lytton to determine if Japan had committed
aggression or not. St. Léger favored having the League General Assembly "approve" and "adopt" the
Lytton report, but then leave the resolution of the Sino-Japanese dispute to the mediation by the powers
that had signed the 9-Power Treaty of 1922 plus Germany and the Soviet Union.[26] In a report St. Léger
wrote about the crisis in Asia, he described both Japan and China as both hostile towards France's special
rights in China, but wrote that Japan was by far the most dangerous of the two.[26] St. Léger wrote that
ever since the mid-1920s Japan had been "regressing" towards "Asian particularism".[26] St. Léger used
as an example of Japan's "regression" the rather violent police campaign against "western decadence"
such as young couples kissing in public (traditionally considered to be disgusting behavior in Japan).
Besides for a general hostility towards western values shown by the Japanese state, St. Léger wrote that
even more disturbing were the claims of an "Asian Monroe Doctrine" in which all of Asia was considered
to be Japan's sphere of influence.[26] St. Léger wrote that Japan was steadily moving away from
"integration into the entente between the great world powers" and "from the contractual system of the
League".[26] He concluded that Japan was conducting "a systematic program of wild imperialism", which
he predicated might one day cause a war.[26]

St. Léger advocated that France should vote for sanctions against Japan at the League General Assembly
as he argued that this was the best way of stopping a war in Asia.[35] St. Léger wrote that the colony of
French Indochina, France's other colonies in the Pacific, and its special rights in China, especially the
French Concession in Shanghai, were profitable and worth defending against Japan.[36] St. Léger wrote
the main danger was to French Indochina was the "reorganization on its border, with or against Japan, of
an united and disciplined China".[36] St. Léger argued that French diplomacy had to be careful to not
appear to be offering "unqualified approval of Chinese claims and methods" and to avoid a solution that
"would push Japan towards extreme methods".[36] As it was, when the Lytton commission report was
presented in March 1933, Japan left the League of Nations in protest.[36] St. Léger's advocacy of closer
ties with Britain and if possible, the United States as well, were much as motivated by fear of Japan as
fear of Germany.[26]

From Barthou to Blum

Of the all foreign ministers St. Léger served after 1932, only Louis
Barthou he respected as he wrote that he had the vision to achieve
"the great rules of French diplomacy".[24] St. Léger wrote that he
wanted to maintain the Locarno system as he stated: "The
structure of Locarno was for a decade our only cornerstone in
Europe; the only one which inspired the respect of Hitler by the
precision and strictness of its mechanism, the only one which felt
obliged to acknowledge officially and repeatedly until the moment
which he discerned the inner weaknesses of the beneficiaries of
the system".[37] In 1934, Barthou initially considered sacking St.
Léger as he believed him to be opposed to his policy of seeking an
alliance with the Soviet Union, but changed his mind after he
discovered St. Léger was the ideal man to conduct the talks with
the Soviets.[38]
St. Leger in an undated photo.
Barthou's plans for an "Eastern Locarno"-which were intended as
a cover for an alliance with the Soviet Union-created much
opposition in Britain. Between 9–10 July 1934 a French delegation consisting of Barthou; St. Léger;
Charles Corbin, the ambassador in London; the Political Director René Massigli; and Roland de Margerie
held a conference inLondon with the Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon; Sir Robert Vansittart, the
Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office; Sir Anthony Eden, the League of Nations minister;
Orme Sargent and Lord Stanhope.[39] Simon ridiculed French fears of Nazi Germany, and when Barthou
said an "Eastern Locarno" was necessary to protect France and its allies in Eastern Europe, Simon
incredulously replied "To protect yourselves from Germany?"[39] Barthou, known as one of the most
tougher French politicians dismissed the British objections while St. Léger and Corbin were more
conciliatory.[39] St. Léger spoke of: "the fundamental importance that France attached to her friendship
with England. She does not want to do anything against Great Britain. Better still, the French government
does not wish to get into anything without Great Britain".[39] St. Léger wrote the assassination of Barthou
in Marseilles while greeting King Alexander of Yugoslavia who was also killed was a great blow to
French diplomacy as he considered Barthou to be the only effective foreign minister he served.[40]

Barthou's successor, Pierre Laval sough an alliance with Italy and was prepared to cede the Aouzou Strip
of French Equatorial Africa to the Italian colony of Libya to win the friendship of Benito Mussolini.[41]
St. Léger felt that Laval was far too keen for an agreement with Mussolini as he wrote that he only
wanted a voyage de Rome and put little attention to the details of the agreement, which inspired St. Léger
to threaten to resign in protest.[41] St. Léger who went with Laval to Rome for the summit with Mussolini
was excluded from the private meetings where Laval essentially gave Mussolini a free hand to invade
Ethiopia.[38] Likewise, St. Léger felt that Laval was too keen to make his voyage de Moscow to meet
Joseph Stalin, which St. Léger wrote was for him was merely a voyage de cabotin.[40] When St. Léger
objected that more time was needed to prepare for the Franco-Soviet alliance, Laval replied: "Vous
couchez avec les affaires".[40]

St. Léger was a close friend of Edvard Beneš, the long-time foreign minister of Czechoslovakia who
became president in 1935, and he tended to take a strong pro-Czechoslovak line.[42] The Canadian
historian John Cairns described as St. Leger as a "rather strange" character who chose to undercut policy
initiatives that he disapproved of.[43] Between 13 and 15 May 1935, St. Léger went to Moscow with the
premier of the republic, Pierre Laval, to sign the Franco-Soviet alliance.[44] Foreign visitors were rarely
allowed to see Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, and it was considered a great honor that Laval and the rest of
the French visitors were allowed to meet Stalin along with the premier, Vyacheslav Molotov and the
foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov.[44] As was normally the case, Stalin said little and instead
phlegmatically smoked his pipe while Molotov and Litvinov did most of the talking. As Litvinov was
fluent in French and was more charming than the "hard man" Molotov, St. Léger spoke to him the most.
On the return trip to Paris, St. Léger attended the funeral of Poland's de facto leader, Marshal Józef
Piłsudski in Warsaw and in Berlin attended Laval's meeting with Hermann Göring.[45]

During the Abyssinia Crisis, St. Léger proposed in November 1935 a meeting between the British
Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare with Laval.[46] On 7–8 December 1935, Hoare met with Laval in
Paris where the two agreed to the Hoare–Laval Pact under which Italy would receive two-thirds of
Ethiopia in exchange for ending the war.[47] St. Leger was opposed to the Hoare-Laval Pact that
essentially rewarded Italy for invading Ethiopia.[47] He saw Laval's policy of seeking to improve relations
with Italy at the expense of Ethiopia as amoral and sabotaged the Hoare-Laval pact by leaking it to the
French press.[47] On 13 December 1935, the columnist Geneviève Tabouis in L'Œuvre and the columnist
André Géraud who wrote under the pen-name Pertinax in L'Echo de Paris both broke the story of the
Hoare-Laval pact, which led to highly negative reactions in both France and the United Kingdom.[47] In
London, the news of the Hoare-Laval pact came very close to bringing down the government of Stanley
Baldwin and Hoare was forced to resign in disgrace, being made the "fall guy" as Baldwin lied to the
House of Commons by claiming that Hoare was acting on his initiative.

On 7 March 1936, Germany violated both the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno by the
remiliziation of the Rhineland.[48] St. Léger called for France to respond by sending a military force to
evict the Wehrmacht from the Rhineland as he noted the remiliziation placed France in grave long-term
danger.[48] General Maurice Gamelin insisted that only a general mobilization would provide the
sufficient force to expel the Wehrmacht from the Rhineland, which as a considerable surprise who
thought of a "police operation" to expel the Wehrmacht from the Rhineland.[48] Cameron wrote: "Even
severe critics recognize that Léger and the permanent services were determined to preserve
demilitarization at whatever cost. Unfortunately, they did not succeed in overcoming the confusions and
hesitations which prevailed at the top level".[48] To discuss the crisis, a meeting of the League Council
was called in London.[48] Flandin, who replaced Laval as foreign minister, attended the conference along
with St. Léger.[49] St. Léger wrote with disgust that Flandin at the conference followed the politique de
complaisance and proved all too willing to accept the remiliziation.[50] St. Léger wrote that the British
Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden at the conference rolled "a velvet carpet for retreat" by making
vague promises of Anglo-French staff talks in return for French acceptance of the remiliziation, an offer
which Flandin accepted.[50] St. Léger wrote that the French Army should have marched into the
Rhineland as he maintained that the British would have forced to follow suit.[50]

St. Léger noted that Britain had signed both the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno and argued
that British honor would have forced the United Kingdom to follow the lead of France in enforcing both
treaties with regard to the Rhineland.[50] St. Léger that it was the remiliziation of the Rhineland, not the
Munich Agreement, that was the turning point in France's fortunes.[50] St. Léger wrote: "It was the
London conference of March 1936, not Munich, which must bear the responsibility for Hitler's flooding
over the banks".[50] St. Léger noted the remiliziation of the Rhineland altered the balance of power
decisively in favor of the Reich by exposing France once again to the threat of German invasion and by
allowing Germany to refortify the Franco-German border.[50] As long as the Rhineland was demilitarized,
western Germany was open to a French offensive, which protected France's allies in Eastern Europe such
as Czechoslovakia and Poland from German aggression.[50] In his "political testament" written after his
return from London, St. Léger wrote that war was "inevitable" as he predicated that Germany would
refortify the Franco-German border and invade France's allies in Eastern Europe, secure in the knowledge
that the Rhineland would be protected from a French offensive.[50] Despite his belief that war was
"inevitable", St. Léger followed a policy he called "irréductible dans l'irrédutiblité" of seeking to best
prepare France for the coming conflict.[50]

After the League of Nations sanctions against Italy ended in July 1936, the French tried hard to revive the
Stresa Front, displaying "...an almost humiliating determination to retain Italy as an ally".[51] The
American historian Barry Sullivan wrote "A.J.P. Taylor erred in asserting that the British and the French
drove Mussolini into an alliance with Hitler. Ironically, Mussolini responded to Germany, Britain and
France in inverse proportion to their degree of dishonesty and their threat to Italy: Germany, which
consistently treated Italy worse than did the other two countries, was rewarded with Mussolini's
friendship; France, which generally offered Italy the highest level of co-operation and true partnership,
was rewarded with rebuffs and abuse. British policy and Mussolini's reaction to it, fell between these
extremes"[52] Both the British and the French very much wanted a rapprochement with Italy to undo the
damage caused by the League of Nations sanctions, and Sullivan wrote: "That Mussolini chose to ally
with Hitler, rather than being forced.".[51] St. Léger had a very strong dislike of Fascist Italy and
consistently opposed the effort to improve relations with Rome as he argued that Mussolini was set about
an anti-French alliance with Germany, and there was nothing that French diplomacy could do to change
Mussolini's foreign policy choices.[42]
St. Léger was willing to serve the Front Populaire government of Léon Blum.[50] He described as "a man
of the Left, an opponent of everything antirepublican".[53] During the Spanish Civil War, St. Léger argued
very forcefully to Blum that France needed an alliance with Great Britain and that France could not afford
a breach with Britain over the issue of Spain.[54] He therefore argued to Blum that France should cease
supplying arms to the Spanish Republic and agree to the British plan for arms embargo on both sides.[54]

The strong man of the Quai d'Orsay

Within the Foreign Office he led the optimist faction that believed that Germany was unstable and that if
Britain and France stood up to Hitler, he would back down.[55] In October 1936, St. Léger welcomed the
new American ambassador to Paris, William Christian Bullitt Jr. who arrived together with his right-hand
man Carmel Offie.[56] St. Léger told Bullitt that the French were greatly pleased that the American
president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had appointed one of his best friends as ambassador to France, saying
he regarded this as a sign that Roosevelt placed much great value on Franco-American relations.[56] St.
Léger told Bullitt that he was personally happy that Roosevelt had appointed a man fluent in French as
ambassador as he observed for the last 16 years no American ambassador had spoken French, which he
took as a sign that Roosevelt valued France, and while also telling the openly gay Offie that
homosexuality was legal in France. In January 1937, rumors started to appear in the French newspapers
that stated the Wehrmacht was operating in Spanish Morocco.[54] The closeness of Spanish Morocco to
the Strait of Gibraltar that linked the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean led the possibility of a
German military presence in Spanish Morocco to be considered unacceptable in both Paris and London.
As the Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos was out of Paris, St. Léger was in charge of the Quai d'Orsay and
he acted with dispatch, having meeting with the German ambassador Count Johannes von Welczeck,
where he protested in the most strongest terms, saying he regarded a German military presence in Spanish
Morocco as a threat to French interests.[54] St. Léger was close to the French ambassador in London,
Charles Corbin, and had him secure a promise of British support from Robert Vansittart, the Permeant
Undersecretary at the Foreign Office.[54] Cameron noted that the Germans were outraged by St. Léger's
démarche as she wrote: "They had felt a strong hand at the helm of French foreign policy and they didn't
like it. Thus, the incident added another black mark to their dossier on Léger as a public enemy of the
Reich".[57]

The Sudetenland crisis

On 5 April 1938, St. Léger attended a conference at the Quai d'Orsay concerning Eastern Europe
alongside Joseph Paul-Boncour the Foreign Minister; Robert Coulondre, the ambassador in Moscow;
Léon Noël, the ambassador in Warsaw; Victor de Lacroix, the minister in Prague; Raymond Brugère, the
minister in Belgrade; and Adrien Thierry, the minister in Bucharest. [58] The principle conclusion of the
conference was that as long as France's allies in Eastern Europe continued to feud with each other, no
resistance to Nazi Germany was possible.[58] The conference ended with a plan being adopted to see it if
was possible for King Carol II of Romania to allow the Red Army transit rights across Romania to aid
Czechoslovakia in the event of a German invasion, which in turn led to Coulondre and Thierry being
assigned to find a way to end the Bessarabia dispute as Carol would not allow the Red Army to enter his
kingdom as long as the Soviet Union continued to claim Bessarabia.[58] Much anger was expressed
during the conference at the Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck, whose attitude towards
Czechoslovakia was hostile at best and who was utterly against granting the Red Army transit rights
across Poland to aid Czechoslovakia in the event of a German invasion.[58]
On 10 April 1938, a new government under Édouard Daladier was formed. Joseph Paul-Boncour, a
foreign minister whom St. Léger felt was well meaning, but ineffectual did not retain his portfolio in the
new cabinet.[38] Paul-Boncour was replaced with Georges Bonnet, whom St. Léger later wrote was the
worse of the many foreign ministers he served.[38] St. Léger described Bonnet as very intelligent, but
secretive, scheming, duplicitous and committed to a policy of ending the French alliance system in
Eastern Europe that he was opposed to.[38] One diplomat recalled that Bonnet and St. Léger had "no
rapport".[59] St. Léger favored "la ligne anglaise" ("the English line") of seeking closer ties with
Britain.[60] St. Léger favored the British policy during the Sudetenland crisis of seeking concessions from
Beneš out of the belief that ultimately the Chamberlain government would come to see that Adolf Hitler
was the problem in Czechoslovak-German relations after Beneš made enough concessions, and then
swing around to the support of Czechoslovakia.[61] He accompanied the French Premier Édouard
Daladier at the Munich Conference in 1938, where the timetable of the cession of the Sudetenland region
of Czechoslovakia to Germany was agreed to. The British historian Robert Payne wrote: "The hero of the
Munich conference was Alexis St. Léger, the permanent secretary of the French Foreign Office , who
kept urging Daladier to resist Hitler's demands , but Daladier was too stunned , too sunk in melancholy ,
to pay much him attention".[62] Paul Schmidt, who served as Hitler's interpreter (Hitler did not speak
French), recalled that St. Léger kept raising objections at the Munich Conference, much to Hitler's
annoyance.[63]

From Munich to Danzig

In October 1938, the pro-appeasement Foreign Minister Georges
Bonnet carried out a purge of the Quai d'Orsay, sidelining a
number of officials opposed to his policy. In the aftermath of the
purge, Bonnet was congratulated by the equally pro-appeasement
British ambassador Sir Eric Phipps for removing the
"warmongers" René Massigli and Pierre Comert from the Quai
d'Orsay, but he went on to complain that Bonnet should have
sacked Secretary-General St. Léger as well.[64] In response,
Saint-John Perse attends the
Bonnet claimed that he and St. Léger saw "eye to eye" about the negotiations for the Munich
policy to be pursued towards Germany and Italy.[64] Phipps, who Agreement on 29 September 1938.
knew about the true state of relations between the two, drily noted He stands behind Mussolini, right. In
that "in that case the eyes must be astigmatic". [64] In fact, Bonnet the foreground are Neville
had very much wanted to sack St. Léger, but the latter was Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier,
[64] Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and
protected by his friendship with Daladier. Phipps-who believed
Count Galeazzo Ciano To St.
that appeasement was the only way to save Western civilization- Léger's left are Joachim von
greatly disliked St. Léger for his anti-appeasement views. On 24 Ribbentrop and Ernst von
October 1938, Phipps reported to Lord Halifax: "I saw him [St. Weizsäcker
Léger] this afternoon and found him convinced as ever that no
arrangement could be reached between France and Germany or
Italy. In fact, his point of view remains entirely sterile".[65] Contrary to Bonnet's policy of seeking to end
the French alliance system in Eastern Europe, in November 1938, St. Léger played a key role in sending
out a French mission to Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria to increase French economic influence in the
Balkans.[66]
On 6 December 1938, St. Léger was present in the Clock Room of the Quai d'Orsay standing alongside
Count von Welczeck as he watched the Declaration of Franco-German Friendship that was signed by
Bonnet and the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.[67] St. Léger was shocked that
Ribbentrop brought along with him to Paris 600 academic experts, who played no role during the Franco-
German summit, and whose only purpose was to show the power of Ribbentrop.[68] During the visit of
Ribbentrop, he and Bonnet went out for a walk in the Tuileries Garden where Bonnet was said to have
told Ribbentrop that the French alliance system in Eastern Europe was over and that France now
recognized Eastern Europe as being within Germany's exclusive sphere of influence.[68] St. Léger who
was present during the walk in the Tuileries Garden denied that Bonnet made that claim and instead
stated that Bonnet had actually said was that France now recognized Czecho-Slovakia as being in the
German sphere of influence.[68] Regardless of what Bonnet actually said, Ribbentrop upon his return to
Berlin told Hitler that France now accepted that Eastern Europe was within the sphere of influence of the
Reich and there was no danger of France going to war for Poland.[68]

When Germany violated the Munich Agreement on 15 March 1939 by occupying the Czech half of
Czecho-Slovakia which was turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, St. Léger was
outraged and argued that Robert Coulondre, the ambassador in Berlin, should be recalled in protest to
show the Germans "the seriousness of the situation".[69] In an unusual move, he met privately with
Daladier to complain about "the weak attitude and hesitancy of M. Bonnet, and against his being himself
'surrounded with reticence'" as he charged that Bonnet kept him in the dark about what he was doing.[69]
When Bonnet went to London to see Chamberlain and Lord Halifax four days later, St. Léger was
ordered to stay in Paris as Bonnet felt that St. Léger would take a different line with the British than what
he favored.[69] In a memo he wrote about the "probable attitude" of Britain and Poland, St. Léger wrote
that the foreign policy of Colonel Beck was entirely "cynical and false", and that Beck wanted a military
alliance with Britain, which he believed the British would refuse.[69] St. Léger further predicated that
Beck would follow his usual "hand-to-mouth policy" and moved closer to the Reich when the
Chamberlain government refused to "undertake a definite commitment" to defend Poland.[69] Regarding
the United Kingdom, St. Léger predicated that "France and Great Britain were at the turning of the
road".[69]

The Danzig crisis

During the Danzig crisis, St. Léger very much favored Daladier's plans for a "peace front" of the Soviet
Union, France and the United Kingdom to deter Germany from invading Poland. During the Tilea Affair
of March 1939 when France's ally Romania appeared to be on the brink of a German invasion to seize its
oil wells, St. Léger was furious with Colonel Beck, whose statements implied that Poland would not
assist Romania as Beck noted that the Romanian-Polish alliance only applied against the Soviet Union,
not Germany.[70] At a meeting with Juliusz Łukasiewicz, the Polish ambassador in Paris, St. Léger
expressed his rage, saying: "Poland refuses to join France and England in protecting Romania".[70] St.
Léger sent a long letter to both the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and the prime minister Neville
Chamberlain that denounced Colonel Beck as a ruthless, unscrupulous and devious opportunist whose
word was not to be trusted and who was about to ally Poland to the Reich.[70] At a meeting with Phipps,
St. Léger expressed the hope that Britain would not "put the cart before the horse" by subordinating
decision-making to King Carol II of Romania, whom St. Léger distrusted almost as much as he distrusted
Beck.[70] St. Léger had a dismissive view of France's allies in Eastern Europe as he told Phipps: "These
governments would decide their attitude in accordance with the intentions of France and Great Britain. In
any case, they were only what he called 'corollaries'".[69]
Starting on 18 March 1939, St. Léger took to cultivating American public opinion by using 25, 000 francs
to cover the travel expense to send out various English-speaking French cultural figures such as André
Maurois, Ève Curie, Jules Romains, and Georges Duhamel to tour the United States.[71] St. Léger
believed that the promise of American support would be essential to allow France to face the Reich in the
Danzig crisis, and he felt that such cultural diplomacy using the historical relationship between France
and the United States as well their shared democratic values would win the American public over to a
more favorable view of France.[71] Much to St. Léger's surprise, on 31 March 1939, Chamberlain
reversed his long-standing policy of "no commitments beyond the Rhine" by announcing in the House of
Commons the famous British "guarantee" of Poland.[69]

In the Danzig crisis, relations between Bonnet and Daladier became increasing strained and hostile as the
two men held diametrically opposed views about whatever France should go to war for Poland. Starting
in April 1939, Daladier worked to marginalise Bonnet by dealing directly with St. Léger and entirely by-
passing the foreign minister.[72] St. Léger knew from the reports of the Deuxième Bureau that the
Chamberlain government was deeply worried about the prospect of Japan taking advantage of a war in
Europe to seize Britain's Asian colonies and threaten Australia and New Zealand, and wanted American
support in the Pacific.[73] On 11 April 1939, Lord Halifax had written a letter to U.S. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt asking him to move the U.S. Atlantic fleet to the Pacific to dissuade the Japanese from
taking advantage of the Danzig crisis, a request that Roosevelt had refused.[73] Knowing that the British
would be more active in Europe if the Americans were more involved in Asia, St. Léger met with William
Christian Bullitt Jr., the American ambassador in Paris and a close friend of Roosevelt's, to tell him that
the Deuxième Bureau was aware of a secret German-Japanese plan that Japan would attack the European
colonies in Asia the moment Germany invaded Poland.[73] Prying on American stereotypes of Britain, St.
Léger told Bullitt that pressure from the city had led Chamberlain to decide to send the main part of the
Royal Navy to Singapore (the major British naval base in Asia) and accordingly the Danzig crisis was
more likely to end in war.[73] Bullitt-who talked on the telephone on a daily basis with Roosevelt-
accordingly passed on these claims to Roosevelt, who reversed himself and ordered much of the U.S.
Atlantic fleet transferred over the Pacific fleet.[73] St. Léger himself was concerned about the Japanese as
he noted that in February 1939 the Japanese had occupied the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea,
which placed Japanese forces very close to French Indochina while France could spare no naval forces
for Asia because of the crisis in Europe.[74]

On 14 April 1939, Roosevelt had written Hitler a letter asking him to promise not to attack any more
countries. On 28 April 1939, Hitler in an address to the Reichstag mocked Roosevelt by reading out the
response of 34 world leaders who provided the polite answer to requests from German diplomats that
their nations did not feel threatened by Germany (though notably the United Kingdom, France, Poland
and the Soviet Union were absent from Hitler's list).[75] In the aftermath of Hitler's speech, St. Léger told
Bullitt that Hitler in his speech had responded to Roosevelt's request to settle the Danzig crisis peacefully
by renouncing the German-Polish nonaggression pact; that the tone of Hitler's speech was notably
bellicose; and that Hitler had no notion of justice as proven by his "enslavement" of the Czech people.[75]
For all reasons, St. Léger predicated that Hitler wanted war over Danzig and asked Bullitt to use his
influence with Roosevelt to persuade the president to ask Congress to amend the American Neutrality
acts.[76] On 29 April 1939, Bonnet met the Soviet ambassador Jakob Suritz who complained about the
"absence of reciprocity in obligations" in Bonnet's draft treaty of an Anglo-Soviet-French alliance.[77]
Bonnet quite causally claimed to be ignorant of what the draft treaty stated and blamed St. Léger, whom
he stated was incompetent and not capable of writing treaties properly.[77]
Between 16 and 19 May 1939, a Polish delegation led by the Military Affairs Minister, General Tadeusz
Kasprzycki, visited Paris to strength the Franco-Polish alliance; to work out staff plans if Germany did
invade Poland and to facilitate French arms shipments to Poland.[78] General Maurice Gamelin and
Kasprzycki signed a military accord, which remained a dead letter as no political accord was signed.[79]
Bonnet claimed to Gamelin that the political accord was not ready to be signed as the staff of he Quai
d'Orsay needed more time for the text, but Gamelin discovered that claim was a lie as he phoned St.
Léger who stated that he and the rest of the Quai d'Orsay staff had prepared the political accord several
weeks before the Polish delegation arrived.[80] Daladier was on holiday in the south of France, and by the
time Gamelin and St. Léger were able to contact him via phone, Kasprzycki and the rest of the Polish
delegation had left Paris.[80] Gamelin was stunned by the lengths that Bonnet was prepared to go to find a
way to end the alliance with Poland, but St. Léger informed him that this was the norm with Bonnet.[81]

St. Léger had an anti-clerical views and was strongly opposed to the offer of Pope Piux XII to mediate an
end to the Danzig crisis.[82] St. Léger told Phipps that most of the senior officials of the Catholic Church
hierarchy were closeted gay men who had been blackmailed into working for the Fascist regime. St.
Léger called the Pope's mediation offer a power play by Mussolini, and stated that Cardinal Maglione, the
right-hand man of the Pontiff, was acting as an Italian rather as an agent of the Vatican.[82] St. Léger
ended by saying the Vatican should restrict itself to appeals for peace "on a general basis and usual plane
for peace" and to "not get involved in political matters which it should leave to the Chancelleries".[82]

French decision-makers were far more keen on having the Soviet Union join the "peace front" to protect
Poland than British decision-makers, and St. Léger was annoyed with the attitude of Chamberlain who
continued to insist that Britain would never sign a military alliance with the Soviet Union.[83] On 20 May
1939, Lord Halifax stopped by in Paris on his way to Geneva to attend the spring session of the League of
Nations.[83] During his stop-over in Paris, Halifax was confronted by Daladier, Bonnet and St. Léger who
told him very firmly that only a military alliance with the Soviet Union could stop Germany from
invading Poland, and warned him if Chamberlain continued his foot-dragging, the result would be war in
1939.[83] Halifax came away from his meeting in Paris converted to the French point-of-view and upon
his return to London stated that Britain should start talks for an alliance with Moscow.[84] St. Léger very
much expected the Anglo-French-Soviet talks for an alliance to be successful.[69] In a meeting with
Bullitt on 28 June 1939 St. Léger stated he believed that "there were eighty chances in a hundred" that the
Anglo-French-Soviet talks "would be successfully concluded in the near-future".[85] On 30 June 1939, St.
Léger told Bullitt that the best hope of stopping the Danzig crisis from turning into a war were an alliance
with the Soviet Union and American military aid to France, especially aircraft.[86] St. Léger warned
Bullitt that Hitler seemed very intent on invading Poland and that the only way to stop him would be to
amend the American neutrality acts to allow France to buy modern American aircraft and for a "peace
front" of the Soviet Union, France and Great Britain.[86]

Ever since the Abyssinia crisis of 1935–1936, it had been French policy to repair relations with Italy,
which St. Léger disliked.[85] French plans for a war with Germany required bringing over soldiers from
Algeria and the rest of the Maghreb to compensate for the numerical superiority of the Wehrmacht, and
the possibility of the Regia Marina cutting France off from the Maghreb was considered very concerning
in Paris. In a memo, St. Léger wrote that Benito Mussolini had evidently decided upon alignment with
Germany and that: "Every effort to bring them [the Italians] back to us is destined to fail; it will only
encourage them in their two-faced policy, leading them to name the highest price for their assets and
making them value even more highly the benefits the Axis could offer them".[87] St. Léger complained
that allies of Bonnet in his "peace lobby" such as the Public Works minister Anatole de Monzie were
holding unofficial talks with Italian diplomats on their own, which he felt was Bonnet's way of cutting out
the Quai d'Orsay from his foreign policy.[88] André François-Poncet, the French ambassador in Rome,
was opposed to St. Léger's policy and felt it was still possible to "detach" the Italians from an alliance
with Germany.[88] St. Léger ordered François-Poncet to stick to his "day-to-day business", which led
François-Poncet to lash out against him as he told the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano that
St. Léger was a "sinister man" opposed to better Franco-Italian relations.[88] Phipps had served as the
British ambassador in Berlin between 1933 and 1937 where he became a close friend of François-Poncet,
who served as the French ambassador in Berlin between 1931 and 1938.[89] All through the spring and
summer of 1939, Phipps wrote letters to François-Poncet that accused St. Léger of "Italophobia" and of
being rigidly hostile towards the Fascist regime as Phipps noted that St. Léger disliked Mussolini as a
person.[89] Both Phipps and François-Poncet believed it was possible to "detach" Fascist Italy from
alignment with Nazi Germany, and both felt that St. Léger was the principle man blocking rapprochement
with Italy.[89] Cameron wrote that events proved St. Léger correct about Italy as even though the French
did not make the concessions to the Italians that Bonnet and François-Poncet favored, Italy still remained
neutral when the war began and only entered the war on 10 June 1940 when it was already clear that
France was defeated.[88]

St. Léger very much welcomed the change in British policy during the Danzig crisis, as he noted the lack
of British support in 1938 had made it "impossible" for France to face Germany on its own.[88] Despite
his dislike of Colonel Beck, St. Léger favored a policy of Britain and France making generous loans to
Poland to assist with the modernization of the Polish military "...at once in order to convince the Germans
that France and England are determined to support Poland if Poland should become involved in a war
with Germany".[88] On 21 July 1939, St. Léger told Philps that Daladier was "firmly convinced of the
necessity of showing an irreducible refusal to treat with a regime [Nazi Germany] in whose word no
confidence could be placed and with which any treaty must be valueless...so convinced was Daladier of
the wisdom of an attitude of determined reserve that he had even given orders against any manifestations
of friendship towards Germany such as mutual visits for athletic contests and such like: it was better for
the time being to renounce the natural instinct to act en gentleman".[90] On 2 August 1939, Bonnet told
Philps that his main enemies in the cabinet were Daladier, the Finance minister Paul Reynaud, the Navy
minister César Campinchi, the Interior minister Albert Sarraut, and the Colonial Minister Georges
Mandel.[91] Bonnet further stated that his enemies within the Quai d'Orsay were St. Léger (whom Bonnet
accused of being very disloyal to him) along with Robert Coulondre, the ambassador in Berlin and
Charles Corbin, the ambassador in London as he noted that both Coulondre and Corbin were friends of
St. Léger.[91]

On 3 August 1939, St. Léger learned from French intelligence sources about the British negotiating
tactics for the mission to Moscow, which as defined by Lord Halifax stated: "The British delegation is to
conduct negotiations very slowly, keeping abreast of the political discussions".[92] By contrast, the French
favored the negotiations for the "peace front" to be completed as soon as possible.[93] The two differing
tempo of negotiations favored by the British and French reflected their views on the ultimate desirability
of reaching an understanding with the Reich or not. For Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, the mere act of
engaging in negotiations with the Soviet Union was felt to be sufficient to deter Germany from invading
Poland, and to actually create the "peace front" was felt to be counterproductive as it would make it more
difficult to reach a "general settlement" with Germany.[92] For the French, the "peace front" was felt to be
the only way of deterring Germany from invading Poland, and both Daladier and St. Léger, though not
Bonnet, had little hope of the same sort of understanding with Germany that the British favored.[92] The
French delegation to Moscow headed by General Joseph Doumenc first went to London to join the
British delegation led by Admiral Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax to travel together in a sign of
solidarity.[94] The two delegations boarded a slow-moving ship, the City of Exeter, that moved at only 13
knots per hour to take them to Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg) and hence to Moscow.[94] In common
with other French officials, St. Léger was very much enraged at Colonel Beck who was completely
against allowing the Red Army to enter Poland if Germany should invade while the Soviets insisted on
such transit rights as the precondition for the "peace front".[95] In Moscow, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov,
the Soviet defense commissar, had told General Doumenc that his government regarded the issue of
transit rights as of paramount importance as he insisted that if the French could not pressure the Poles into
granting transit rights for the Red Army, then as far as he was concerned France was not serious about the
"peace front".[96]

On 22 August 1939, St. Léger advised the French cabinet that France should issue a threatening démarche
in Warsaw to force Beck to allow the Red Army transit rights as he argued that the issue was on the verge
of causing the proposed "peace front" to collapse.[27] The Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact of 23
August 1939 stunned French decision-makers and is known in France as "the diplomatic Waterloo of
French history" as the French never saw it coming.[85] The executive decision-makers in Paris had always
expected the "peace front" to be created in one form or another, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact came as
a shocking and most unpleasant surprise in Paris.[85] In desperation, Daladier ordered General Joseph
Doumenc to tell the lie that Beck had finally granted the transit rights.[97] Because such hopes had been
invested in the "peace front" in France, the debate over who was responsible for its failure was especially
bitter. Reynaud accused St. Léger of being the man responsible for the failure to create the "peace front"
as he accused St. Léger of moving too slowly and of not doing enough to pressure Colonel Beck to grant
transit rights to the Red Army.[85] On 25 August 1939, Daladier told Łukasiewicz that he was not to talk
to Bonnet under any conditions, saying the views of the Foreign Minister regarding the Danzig crisis
were not his own, and told the Polish ambassador to only talk to himself or St. Léger.[98] At a cabinet
meeting of 31 August 1939, Daladier was described as having "bristled like a hedgehog" at the cabinet
meeting as he exploded in rage at Bonnet as he warned the planned conference was a "trap" and he
accused Bonnet of sullying France's honor with his opposition to declaring war.[99] At a crucial moment,
Daladier read out a letter from Coulondre that St. Léger had kept secret from Bonnet that won over the
majority of the French cabinet to Daladier's position.[99]

After Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Mussolini proposed a peace conference to stop the
war.[100] Bonnet, who wanted to avoid declaring war on Germany, saw Mussolini's proposal as a way to
avoid war. In an effort to sabotage Bonnet's plans, St. Léger had Corbin tell Lord Halifax later on the
afternoon of 1 September that the British and French governments should place a time limit on
Mussolini's proposed conference, saying that otherwise the Germans would stall and the war would
continue.[100] This message to Corbin was the precise opposite of what Bonnet had wanted Corbin to tell
Lord Halifax.[100] Faced with a choice between obeying the foreign minister and the secretary-general,
Corbin chose the latter.[100] At a crucial meeting of the French cabinet, Bonnet argued that France should
not declare war on Germany and instead embrace Mussolini's conference.[99] Before the meeting, St.
Léger had briefed Daladier and warned him that the conference was merely a trick to prevent France and
Britain from declaring war as Germany would continue the war against Poland while the preparations for
the conference continued, quite possibly for months.[99] In a memo to Daladier, St. Léger wrote that it
was unacceptable to be holding a peace conference while the Reich was waging war on Poland as he
concluded:
 "If such negotiations were to be started by a retreat on the part of the Allies and under the
threat of German force, the democracies would soon find themselves faced with wholly
unacceptable Axis terms. There would be war anyway and under especially unfavorable
conditions. No, the trap is too obvious".[88]

In an unusual move, Bonnet denounced St. Léger in a press conference for having sabotaged his policy as
he contended that Mussolini's peace conference would have ended the war.[101]

When the declaration of war was finally drafted by Bonnet, it evaded the expression la guerre and instead
spoke in convoluted terms that France "would fulfil those obligations contracted towards Poland, which
the German government is aware of".[102] Even then, Bonnet in an attempt to avoid war ordered
Coulondre to set the expiry of the ultimatum for 5: 00 am on 4 September 1939.[102] Coulondre phoned
St. Léger in Paris to ask what he should if Ribbentrop should try to stall him, which led St. Léger to order
him to treat any stalling as a negative reply.[103] At that point, Bonnet took the phone from St. Léger to
tell Coulondre that the expiry of the ultimatum was to be moved up to 5 pm on 3 September 1939.[104]

Dismissal
On 13 September 1939, Daladier finally fired Bonnet as Foreign Minister as he stated that Bonnet's
foreign policy was not his foreign policy.[101] As Daladier was also the premier, he did not have much
time for diplomacy and St. Léger was the de facto French foreign minister until May 1940.[101] Daladier
usually met daily with St. Léger and Coulondre, who was regarded as the German expert within the Quai
d'Orsay, and tended to follow their advice.[101] In February 1940, Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of
state, visited the major European capitals on a peace mission for President Roosevelt. During Welles's
visit to Paris, St. Léger told him: "The game is lost. France is alone against three dictators. Great Britain
is not ready and the United States has not even amended the neutrality act. Once again, the democracies
have arrived too late".[105] It is unlikely that this statement represented St. Léger's real feelings and was
more likely a gambit to try to force the Roosevelt administration to provide more aid to France.[106]
Welles wrote he was struck by "magnificent clarity and logic" shown by St. Léger just as he had "as
always shown" and by the "innately liberal nature of his political philosophy".[37] Relations between
France and Britain were often strained during the winter of 1939–1940 and in March 1940 Daladier told
St. Léger "that what had really taken the stuffing out of him was his loss of faith in his ability ever to
induce the British government to take prompt action or a firm line".[107]

St. Léger was close to Daladier, and after the fall of the Daladier government in March 1940, he was out
of favor with the new premier Paul Reynaud.[108] Reynaud's mistress, the Comtesse Hélène de Portes had
a particular dislike of St. Léger and lobbied her lover very strongly to dismiss him as the secretary-
general of the Quai d'Orsay.[108] On 16 May 1940, the Wehrmacht won the Second Battle of Sedan and
broke through the French lines along the Meuse river, throwing Paris into a state of panic as it was
believed that the capital would fall within hours.[108] St. Léger oversaw the burning of the records of the
Quai d'Orsay which were thrown into a giant bonfire in the garden of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[108]
Reynaud reshuffled his cabinet on 18 May 1940 and appointed Daladier as the new foreign minister.[108]
Portes lobbied Reynaud to dismiss St. Léger before Daladier arrived at the Quai d'Orsay, saying that the
"Léger scalp" was worth 70 votes in the chambre des députés.[108] On the morning of 19 May 1940 St.
Léger learned from reading the morning newspaper that he had just been fired as secretary-general.[108]
Georges Mandel, the minister of colonies, was opposed to St. Léger's sacking, telling Reynaud that firing
a senior diplomat well known for his anti-Nazi views, was sending the wrong message.[108] In mid-July
1940, Leger began a long exile in Washington, DC.

Exile
In 1940, the Vichy government dismissed him from the Légion d'honneur order and revoked his French
citizenship (it was reinstated after the war).[109] Likewise, all of St. Léger's assets were confiscated.[109]
St. Léger's apartment on the Avenue de Camoëns in Paris was looted by the Wehrmacht who burned
several of his unpublished poems, much to his distress when he learned that his poems were now lost
forever.[109] Found inside of St. Léger's apartment was a copy of the Treaty of Versailles on which the
German soldiers mocking wrote: "Much good may it do you now, last defender of the last French
victory!"[109] St. Léger was opposed to Vichy, but did not support the movement led by General Charles
de Gaulle.[109] He was in some financial difficulty as an exile in Washington until Archibald MacLeish,
the director of the Library of Congress and himself a poet, raised enough private donations to enable the
library to employ him until his official retirement from the French civil service in 1947. He declined a
teaching position at Harvard University.

During his American exile, he wrote his long poems Exil, Vents, Pluies, Neiges, Amers, and Chroniques.
In March 1942, his long lyrical poem Exil (Exile) was published in Chicago in the magazine Poetry.[25]
Exil was in many ways his most personal poem as St. Léger recounted his deep longing for France amid
his concerns that he would never see France again.[25] In a long letter to MacLeish written later in 1942,
St. Léger declared "La France est moi-měme et tout moi-měme" ("France is myself and everything for
me").[25] In the same letter, he wrote about his love of the French language, which for him was a refuge
from a world gone mad.[25] St. Léger stated that for him: "...la langue française le seul refuge
imaginable, le seul lieu où je puisse me tenir pour y rien comprendre" ("the French language is the only
refuge imaginable, the only place where I am able to understand anything").[25] During the war, he served
as an unofficial adviser on French affairs to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[110] During the war, St.
Léger found himself caught between the feud between Roosevelt's two closest advisers on foreign affairs,
the Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, and his archenemy, William Christian Bullitt Jr., the former
ambassador to the Soviet Union and France (Roosevelt had little respect for the Secretary of State,
Cordell Hull). Bullitt tried very hard to have Welles fired for being gay after he discovered that Welles
had propositioned two Afro-American railroad porters in 1940. Despite the feud, St. Léger tried his best
to stay on good terms with Welles and Bullitt.[6]

He remained in the US long after the end of the war. In France, St. Léger became known as le grand
absent.[25] In an attempt to encourage St. Léger to return to France, in 1950 the prestigious Cahiers de la
Pléiade devoted an entire issue to St. Léger with articles by André Gide, Paul Claudel, Stephen Spender,
Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, René Char, Renato Poggioli, André Breton, Jorge Guillén, and Giuseppe
Ungaretti that all discussed his influence upon their work.[25] He travelled extensively, observing nature
and enjoying the friendship of US Attorney General Francis Biddle and his spouse, philanthropist
Beatrice Chanler,[111] and author Katherine Garrison Chapin. During his American exile, he increasing
turned nature as the themes of his poems.[17] In his 1943 poem Pluies the subject was rain; in his 1944
poem Neiges the subject was snow; in his 1946 poem Vents the subject was the wind; in his 1957 poem
Amers the subject was the sea; and in his 1959 Chronquie the subject was the earth.[17] St. Léger was
called by the Swedish poet Erik Lindegren "the Linneaus of modern poetry" owing to his fondness of
classifying elements of nature in his poems.[17]

He was on good terms with the UN Secretary General and author Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld had
majored in French literature as a student at the University of Uppsala and always followed very closely
developments in French literature despite his duties at the United Nations.[112] In 1955, Hammarskjöld
visited Beijing to meet the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to negotiate the freedom of 15 American pilots
shot down during the Korean War who were still being held as prisoners' by the Chinese in violation of
the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 which called for the immediate release of all POWs.[113]
Hammarskjöld stated that his visit to Beijing constantly made him think of Anabase, a poem that he
greatly admired (Hammarskjöld was fluent in French), which led him to inquire if were possible to meet
St. Léger.[113] After his return from Beijing, Hammarskjöld wrote: "Subconsciously, my reaction to the
Peking landscape was certainly favored by the Anabase. On the other hand, after reading Anabase after
having seen northern China, it is a new poem-an overwhelming one also in its extraordinary synthesis of
the very soul of that part of the world".[114] To improve his chances of winning the Nobel prize,
Lindegren translated the Anabase into Swedish for the benefit of the members of the Royal Swedish
Academy.[115] The Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl in a letter to St. Léger wrote that he had just
read the Anabase in its Swedish translation and asked for permission to set this "magnificent work" to
music, but with the lyrics all in French.[116] St. Léger who believed that his poems were incapable of
translated because their "internal metrics" could be only rendered in French granted his permission to
Blomdahl.[21] However, in his letter granting permission to Blomdahl, St. Léger wrote that the Anabase
was set in China, but not about China as he wrote that the Anabase should "always be thought of as
outside the boundaries of space and time, as ruled by the absolute".[21]

St. Léger first met Hammarskjöld in New York on 30 November 1955, where he gave him a copy of his
poetry entitled "To Dag Hammarskjöld, the Magician" (a reference to Hammarskjöld's success in
persuading the Chinese to release the 15 American airman).[113] On 19 December 1955, Hammarskjöld
wrote in a letter to a friend: "A couple of times recently I had the pleasure of meeting Léger. I was very
happy to get to know him. What a remarkable man!"[115] Hammarskjöld used his influence in Sweden to
join the campaign to have the Royal Swedish Academy award St. Léger the Nobel Prize in literature.[115]
On 23 December 1955, Hammarskjöld wrote to Andreas Österling, the secretary of the Royal Swedish
Academy: "I recently had the chance to meet Alexis Leger and have seen him since then a couple of
times. He is an extraordinary man, simple and warm, of great knowledge and vast experience, with such a
talant of a storyteller as I have never seen before".[115]

The British diplomat Brian Urquhart who knew both St. Léger and Hammarskjöld wrote in 2001: "Dag
Hammarskjöld was one of that rare and fascinating breed, an intellectual and aesthete who is also a man
of action. As Secretary-General, Hammarskjöld sometimes seemed intimidatingly self-sufficient and
omniscient. Since he was an almost obsessively private person, it only became generally known only
after his death he had relied upon a few carefully selected friends both for advice and support in his
public responsibilities and for regular exchanges on the intellectual and aesthetic matters that were his
main recreation and pleasure".[114] St. Léger as an experienced diplomat and poet was one of
Hammarskjöld's closest friends.[114] Hammarskjöld as the United Nations Secretary-General had difficult
relations with Nikita Khrushchev and Charles de Gaulle.[117] The Francophile Hammarskjöld was
especially pained by the criticism coming from de Gaulle, and he turned to St. Léger for support as
Urquhart noted that he saw St. Léger as "...the embodiment of the France he so deeply admired".[117]
Hammarskjöld felt that de Gaulle was insufficiently understanding of the newly independent nations of
Africa and Asia, and often wrote to St. Léger for his moral support.[117]

Return to France
In 1957, American friends gave him a villa at Giens, Provence, France. He then split his time between
France and the United States. In 1958, he married the American Dorothy Milburn Russell. In 1960, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1961, the American poet Wallace Fowlie praised St. Léger
for his ability to capture in his poems "the inexplicable emotion, the personal trait, the fleeting
intuition".[118] After receiving the Nobel Prize, he wrote the long poems Chronique, Oiseaux and Chant
pour un équinoxe and the shorter Nocturne and Sécheresse. In 1962, Georges Braque worked with master
printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create a series of etchings and aquatints, L'Ordre des Oiseaux,[119]
which was published with the text of Perse's Oiseaux by Au Vent d'Arles.[120]

A few months before he died, Leger donated his library, manuscripts and private papers to Fondation
Saint-John Perse, a research centre devoted to his life and work (Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence), which
remains active to the present day. He died in his villa in Giens and is buried nearby.

Works
Éloges (1911, transl. Eugène Jolas in 1928, Louise Varèse in 1944, Eleanor Clark and
Roger Little in 1965, King Bosley in 1970)
Anabase (1924, transl. T.S. Eliot in 1930, Roger Little in 1970)
Exil (1942, transl. Denis Devlin, 1949)
Pluies (1943, transl. Denis Devlin in 1944)
Poème à l'étrangère (1943, transl. Denis Devlin in 1946)
Neiges (1944, transl. Denis Devlin in 1945, Walter J. Strachan in 1947)
Vents (1946, transl. Hugh Chisholm in 1953)
Amers (1957, transl. Wallace Fowlie in 1958, extracts by George Huppert in 1956, Samuel
E. Morison in 1964)
Chronique (1960, transl. Robert Fitzgerald in 1961)
Poésie (1961, transl. W. H. Auden in 1961)
Oiseaux (1963, transl. Wallace Fowlie in 1963, Robert Fitzgerald in 1966, Roger Little in
1967, Derek Mahon in 2002)
Pour Dante (1965, transl. Robert Fitzgerald in 1966)
Chanté par celle qui fut là (1969, transl. Richard Howard in 1970)
Chant pour un équinoxe (1971)
Nocturne (1973)
Sécheresse (1974)
Collected Poems (1971) Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.
Œuvres complètes (1972), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard. The definitive edition of his
work. Leger designed and edited this volume which includes a detailed chronology of his
life, speeches, tributes, hundreds of letters, notes, a bibliography of the secondary literature,
 and extensive extracts of literature the author admired and was influenced by. Enlarged
edition, 1982.

Homages
A bronze monument, Hommage à Saint-John Perse, sculpted by Patrice Alexandre (ordered
by the french Ministry of Culture in 1985), was inaugurated in 1992 in the garden of the
National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
András Beck notably produced a bronze mask of Saint-John Perse, covered with gold leaf,
which served as a cover vignette for his work in the edition of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
The Saint-John Perse Museum is partly dedicated to him in Point-à-Pitre, his birthplace.
His name was given to various streets and libraries in France.
The 2007 promotion of heritage curators from the french National Heritage Institute bears
his name.
A Reims tramway station bears his name.
In October 1980, the French Post dedicated a stamp to him with a face value of 1.40 + 0.30
francs, available simultaneously in Pointe-à-Pitre and Aix-en-Provence. For the centenary of
the creation of the Nobel Prizes, the British Virgin Islands issued in 2001 a 40-cent stamp
bearing his image.
The Saint-John Perse high school in Pau bears his name.[121]

See also
Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, a list which includes Amers

Secondary literature in English

1936

S. A. Rhodes, "Poetry of Saint-John Perse", The Sewanee Review, vol. XLIV, no. 1, January
– March 1936
1944

Paul Rosenfeld, "The Poet Perse", The Nation, New York, vol. CLVIII, no. 20, 15 May 1944
John Gould Fletcher, "On the Poetry of Alexis Saint-Leger Leger", Quarterly Review of
Literature, vol. II, Autumn 1944
Edouard Roditi, "Éloges and other poems, Saint-John Perse", Contemporary Poetry,
Baltimore, vol. IV, no. 3, Autumn 1944
1945

Conrad Aiken, "Rains, by Saint-John Perse. Whole Meaning or Doodles", New Republic,
Washington, no. CXII, 16 April 1945
1948

David Gascoigne, "Vents by Saint-John Perse", Poetry, London, June–July 1948

1949
 Valery Larbaud, préface à Anabasis, translated by Jacques Le Clerq, in Anabasis, New
York, Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1949
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, préface à Anabasis, translated by James Stern, ibid.
Giuseppe Ungaretti, préface à Anabasis, translated by Adrienne Foulke, ibid.
Archibald MacLeish, "The Living Spring", Saturday Review, vol. XXXII, no. 24, 16 July 1949
Hubert Creekmore, "An Epic Poem of the Primitive Man", New York Times Book Review, 25
December 1949
1950

Allen Tate, "Hommage to Saint-John Perse", Poetry, Chicago, LXXV, January 1950
Harold W. Watts, "Anabase: The Endless Film", University of Toronto Quarterly, vol XIX, no.
3, April 1950
Stephen Spender, "Tribute to Saint-John Perse", Cahiers de la Pléiade, Paris, Summer–
Autumn 1950
1952

Amos Wilder, "Nature and the immaculate world in Saint-John Perse", in Modern Poetry and
the Christian tradition, New York, 1952
Katherine Garrison Chapin, "Saint-John Perse. Notes on Some Poetic Contrasts", The
Sewanee Review
1953

Paul Claudel, "A Poem by St.-John Perse", translation by Hugh Chisholm, in Winds, New
York, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, no. 34, 1953.
Gaëtan Picon, "The Most Proudly Free", translation by Willard R. Trask, ibid, 1st edition in
Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, no. 10, été–automne 1950.
Albert Béguin, "A Poetry Marked by Scansion", translation by Willard R. Trask, ibid, 1st
edition in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, no. 10, été–automne 1950.
Gabriel Bounoure, "St.-John Perse and Poetic Ambiguity", translation by Willard R. Trask,
ibid, 1st edition in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, no. 10, été–automne 1950
Wallace Fowlie, "The Poetics of Saint-John Perse", Poetry,, Chicago, vol. LXXXII, no. 6,
September 1953
Hayden Carruth, "Winds by Saint-John Perse... Parnassus stormed", The Partisan Review,
vol. XX, no. 5, September–October 1953
Henri Peyre, "Exile by Saint-John Perse", Shenandoah, Lexington, vol. V, Winter 1953
1956

"Tribute to Saint-John Perse", The Berkeley Review (Arthur J. Knodel, René Girard,
Georges Huppert), vol. I, no. 1, Berkeley, 1956
1957

Archibald MacLeish, "Saint-John Perse. The Living Spring", in A continuing journey. Essays
and Addresses, Boston, 1957
Wallace Fowlie, "Saint-John Perse", in A Guide to Contemporary French Literature, From
Valéry to Sartre, New York, 1957
Anonymous, "Saint-John Perse, Poet of the Far Shore", Times Literary Supplement,
London, 2 March 1957
Paul West, "The Revival of Epic", The Twentieth Century, London, July 1957
1958

Conrad Aiken, A Reviewer's A.B.C., Collected criticism from 1916, New York, 1958
Jacques Guicharnaud, "Vowels of the Sea: Amers", Yale French Studies, no. 21, Spring–
Summer 1958
Martin Turnell, "The Epic of Saint-John Perse", The Commonweal, LXX, 17 July 1958
W. H. Auden, "A Song of Life's Power to Renew", New York Times Book Review, vol. LXIII,
no. 30, 27 July 1958
Melvin Maddocks, "Perse as Cosmologist", Christian Science Monitor, 4 September 1958
John Marshall, "The Greatest Living French Poet", The Yale Review, XLVIII, September
1958
Katherine Garrison Chapin, "Perse On the Sea With Us: Amers", The New Republic,
Washington, CXXXIX, 27 October 1958
1959

H.-J. Kaplan,"Saint-John Perse: The Recreation of the World", The Reporter, XV, 22
January 1959
Raymond Mortimer, "Mr Eliot and Mr Perse: Two Fine Poets in tandem", Sunday Times,
London, May 1959
Philip Toynbee, "A Great Modern Poet", The Observer, London, 31 May 1959
Charles Guenther, "Prince Among the Prophets", Poetry, Chicago, vol. XCIII, no. 5, 1959
1976

Joseph Henry McMahon, A Bibliography of works by and about Saint-John Perse, Stanford
University, 1959
1960

Stanley Burnshaw, "Saint-John Perse", in The Poem Itself, New York, 1960
Joseph MacMahon, "A Question of Man", Commonweal, LXXIII, 13 January 1960
Byron Colt, "Saint-John Perse", Accent, New York, XX, 3, Summer 1960
Joseph Barry, "Science and Poetry Merge in the Crucial Stage of Creation", New York Post,
12 December 1960
1961

Bernard Weinberg, The Limits of Symbolism. Studies of Five Modern French Poets.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Saint-John Perse, Manchester, 1961
Anthony Hartley, "Saint-John Perse", Encounter, London, no. 2, Feb. 1961
Octavio Paz, "Saint-John Perse as Historian", The Nation, New York, 17 June 1961
Donald Davis, "Chronique by Saint-John Perse", New Statesman, London, LXII, 26 July
1961
John Montague, "The Poetry of Saint-John Perse", Irish Times, Dublin, 25 August 1961
Léon-S. Roudiez, "The Epochal Poetry of Saint-John Perse", Columbia University Forum,
New York, vol. IV, 1961
1962

Anthony Curtis, "Back to the Elements", The Sunday Telegraph, London, 7 January 1962
Amos Wilder, "St-John Perse and the Future of Man", Christianity and Crisis, New York, vol.
XXI, no. 24, 22 January 1962
 Ronald Gaskell, "The Poetry of Saint-John Perse", The London Magazine, vol. I, no. 12,
March 1962
Peter Russel, "Saint-John Perse's Poetical works", Agenda, London, May–June 1962
Cecil Hemley, "Onward and Upward", Hudson Review, XV, Summer 1962
1963

Eugenia Maria Arsenault, Color Imagery in the Vents of Saint-John Perse, Catholic
University of America, Washington, 1963
1964

Arthur J. Knodel, "Towards an Understanding of Anabase", PMLA, June 1964

Eugenia Vassylkivsky, The Main Themes of Saint-John Perse, Columbia University, 1964
1966

Arthur J. Knodel, Saint-John Perse. A Study of His Poetry, Edimburg, 1966

R. W. Baldner, "Saint-John Perse as Poet Prophet" in Proceedings of the Pacific Northwest
Conference on Foreign Languages, vol. XVII, no. 22, 1966
1967

Roger Little, Word Index of the Complete Poetry and Prose of Saint-John Perse, Durham,
1966 and 1967
M. Owen de Jaham, An Introduction to Saint-John Perse, University of South Western
Louisiana, 1967
1968

Kathleen Raine, "Saint-John Perse, Poet of the Marvellous", Encounter, vol. IV, no. 29,
October 1967; idem in Defending Ancient Springs, Oxford, 1968
1969

Roger Little, "T. S. Eliot and Saint-John Perse", The Arlington Quarterly Review, University
of Texas, vol. II, no. 2, Autumn 1969
1970

Charles Delamori, "The Love and Aggression of Saint-John Perse's Pluies", Yale French
Studies, 1970
Richar O. Abel, The Relationship Between the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and Saint-John Perse,
University of Southern California, 1970
1971

Roger Little, Saint-John Perse. A Bibliography for Students of His Poetry, London, 1971
Ruth N. Horry, Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse. Parallels and Contrasts, University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1971
Pierre Emmanuel, Praise and Presence, with a Bibliography, Washington, 1971
Candace Uter De Russy, Saint-John Perse's Chronique: A study of Kronos and Other
Themes through Imagery, Tulane University, 1971
Marc Goodhart, Poet and Poem in Exile, University of Colorado, 1971
1972
 René Galand, Saint-John Perse, New York, 1972
Richard Ruland, America as Metaphor in Modern French Letters. Celine, Julien Green and
Saint-John Perse, New York, 1972
1973

Roger Little, Saint-John Perse, University of London, 1973

Carol Nolan Rigolot, The Dialectics of Poetry: Saint-John Perse, University of Michigan,
1973
1974

Richard-Allen Laden, Saint-John Perse's Vents: From Theme to Poetry, Yale University,
1974
1976

Elizabeth Jackson, Worlds Apart Structural Parallels in the Poetry of Paul Valéry, Saint-John
Perse, Benjamin Perret and René Char, The Hague, 1976
Arthur J. Knodel, Saint-John Perse: Lettres, Princeton, 1979
Edith Jonssen-Devillers, Cosmos and the Sacred in the Poetics of Octavio Paz and Saint-
John Perse, San Diego, University of California, 1976
John M. Cocking, "The Migrant Muse: Saint-John Perse", Encounter, London, XLVI, March
1976
Elizabeth Jennings, "Saint-John Perse: the Worldly Seer", in Seven Men of Vision: an
Appreciation, London, 1976
Roger Little, "A Letter About Conrad by Saint-John Perse", Conradiana, Lubbock, Texas,
VIII, no. 3, Autumn 1976
Anonymous, "An Exile for Posterity", The Times Literary Supplement, London, no. 3860, 5
March 1976
1977

Roger Little, "The Eye at the Center of Things", Times Literary Supplement, London, no.
3941, 7 October 1977
Roger Little, "Saint-John Perse and Joseph Conrad: Some Notes and an Uncollected
Letter", Modern language Review, Cambridge, LXII, no. 4, October 1977
Roger Little, "The World and the Word in Saint-John Perse", in Sensibility and Creation:
Essays in XXth Century French Poetry, London and New York, 1977
John D. Price, "Man, Women and the Problem of Suffering in Saint-John Perse", Modern
Language Review, Cambridge, LXII, no. 3, July 1977
1978

Reino Virtanen, "Between Saint-John and Persius: Saint-John Perse and Paul Valéry",
Symposium, Summer 1978
Roger Little, "Saint-John Perse and Denis Devlin: A compagnonage", Irish University
Review, Dublin, VIII, Autumn 1978
1979

Roger Little, "Claudel and Saint-John Perse. The Convert and the Unconvertible", Claudel
Studies, VI, 1979
1982
 Steven Winspur, "Saint-John Perse's Oiseaux: the Poem, the Painting and Beyond", L'Esprit
Créateur, Columbia University, XXII, no. 4, Winter 1982
1983

William Calin, "Saint-John Perse", in A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in
France, University of Toronto Press, 1983
Steven Winspur, "The Poetic Significance of the Thing-in-itself", Sub-stance, no. 41, 1983
Joseph T. Krause, "The Visual Form of Saint-John Perse's Imagery", Aix-en-Provence, 1983
Peter Fell, "A Critical Study of Saint-John Perse's Chronique" . MA dissertation, University of
Manchester, 1983
1984

Saint-John Perse: Documentary Exhibition and Works on the Poem Amers, Washington,
1984–1985
1985

Erika Ostrovsky, Under the Sign of Ambiguity: Saint-John Perse/Alexis Leger, New York,
1985
1988

Steven Winspur, Saint-John Perse and the Imaginary Reader, Geneva, 1988
Peter Baker, "Perse on Poetry", The Connecticut Review, Willimantic, XI, no. 1, 1988
Peter Baker, "Saint-John Perse, Alexis Leger, 1960", The Nobel Prize Winners: Literature,
April 1988
1990

Peter Baker, "Exile in Language", Studies in 20th century Literature, Manhattan (Kansas)
and Lincoln (Nebraska), XIV, no. 2, Summer 1990
Erika Ostrovsky, "Saint-John Perse", The Twentieth Century, New York, 1990
1991

Luigi Fiorenzato, Anabasis/Anabase: T. S. Eliot translates Saint-John Perse, Padova, 1991–

1992
Peter Baker, "Metric, Naming and Exile: Perse, Pound, Genet", in The Scope of Words in
Honor to Albert S. Cook, New York, 1991
Peter Baker, Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem, University of
Florida Press, 1991
1992

Josef Krause, "The Two Axes of Saint-John Perse's Imagery", Studi Francesi, Torino,
XXXVI, no. 106, 1992
Carol Rigolot, "Ancestors, Mentors and 'Grands Aînés': Saint-John Perse's Chronique",
Literary Generations, Lexington, 1992
1994

Richard L. Sterling, The Prose Works of Saint-John Perse. Towards an Understanding of

His Poetry, New York, 1994
1996
 Richard A. York, "Saint-John Perse, the Diplomat", Claudel Studies, XXIII, 1–2, 1996
1997

Judith Urian, The Biblical Context in Saint-John Perse's Work, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, 1997
1999

Mary Gallagher, "Seminal Praise: The Poetry of Saint-John Perse", in An Introduction to

Caribbean Francophone writing, Oxford, 1999
Carol Rigolot, "Saint-John Perse's Oiseaux: from Audubon to Braque and Beyond", in
Resonant Themes: Literature, History and the Arts in XIXth and XXth Century Europe,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1999
Judith Urian, "Delicious Abyss: the Biblical Darkness in the Poetry of Saint-John Perse",
Comparative literature studies, XXXVI, no. 3, 1999
2000

Jeffrey Mehlman, Émigré New York. French Intellectuals in Wartime, Manhattan, 1940–
1944, Baltimore and London, 2000
Zeyma Kamalick, In Defense of Poetry: T. S. Eliot's Translation of Anabase by Saint-John
Perse, Princeton, 2000
2001

Emmanuelle Hériard Dubreuil, Une certaine idée de la France: Alexis Leger's Views During
the Occupation of France June 1940 – August 1944, London School of Economics, 2001
Pierre Lastenet, Saint-John Perse and the Sacred, University of London, 2001
Marie-Noëlle Little, The Poet and the Diplomat [Correspondence Saint-John Perse/Dag
Hammarskjöld], Syracuse University Press, 2001
Marie-Noëlle Little, "Travellers in Two Worlds: Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger", in
Development Dialogue, Uppsala, 2001
2002

Carol Rigolot, Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse's Conversations with Culture, The
University of North Carolina Press, 2002
2003

Mary Gallagher, "Remembering Caribbean Childhoods, Saint-John Perse's Éloges and

Patrick Chamoiseau's Antan d'enfance", in The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature,
Language, Culture, The University of West Indies Press, 2003
2004

Colette Camelin, "Hermes and Aphrodite in Saint-John Perse's Winds and Seamarks", in
Hermes and Aphrodite Encounters, Birmingham, 2004
Patrick Chamoiseau, "Excerpts Freely Adapted From Meditations for Saint-John Perse",
Literature and Arts of the Americas, XXXVII, no. 1
2005

Henriette Levillain, Saint-John Perse, Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris, 2005
Joseph Acquisto, "The Lyric of Narrative: Exile, Poetry and Story in Saint-John Perse and
Elisabeth Bishop", Orbis Litterarum, no. 5, 2005
 Xue Die, "Saint-John Perse's Palm Trees", American Letters and Commentary, no. 17, 2005
Valérie Loichot, "Saint-John Perse's Imagined Shelter: J'habiterai mon nom, in Discursive
Geographies, Writing Space and Place in French, Amsterdam, 2005
Carol Rigolot, "Blood Brothers: Archibald MacLeish and Saint-John Perse", Archibald
MacLeish Journal, Summer 2005
Carol Rigolot, "Saint-John Perse", in Transatlantic relations, France and the Americas,
Culture, Politics, History, Oxford and Santa Barbara, 2005
2007

Valérie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant,

Morrison and Saint-John Perse, University of Virginia Press, 2007
Harris Feinsod, "Reconsidering the 'Spiritual Economy': Saint-John Perse, His Translators
and the Limits of Internationalism", "Benjamin, Poetry and Criticism", Telos, New York, no.
38, 2007
Peter Poiana, "The Order of Nemesis in Saint-John Perse's Vents", Neophilologus, vol. 91,
no. 1, 2007
Jeffrey Meyers, "The Literary Politics of the Nobel Prize", Antioch Review, vol. 65, no. 2,
2007

Notes
1. During his lifetime, he wanted to make believe that Saint-Leger Leger was his real name.
2. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1961 (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1960/summa
ry/) nobelprize.org
3. Little 2001, p. 3.
4. Cameron 1953, p. 379.
5. Little 2001, p. 4.
6. Little 2001, p. 6.
7. They are some of the intellectual friendships over the course of his lifetime that are attested
to by the correspondence published in his Œuvres Complètes.
8. Fowlie 1961, p. 255.
9. Little 2001, p. 6-7.
10. Loichot 2007, p. 82.
11. Loichot 2007, p. 81-82.
12. Loichot 2007, p. 81.
13. Loichot 2007, p. 80.
14. Loichot 2007, p. 87-88.
15. Loichot 2007, p. 114-115.
16. Little 2001, p. 12.
17. Little 2001, p. 7.
18. Meltz, Renaud (2008). Alexis Léger dit Saint-John Perse (https://www.academia.edu/22468
774) (in French). Paris: Éditions Flammarion. p. 200. ISBN 978-2-0812-0582-6.
19. Fuller 2022, p. 100.
20. Little 2001, p. 9.
21. Little 2001, p. 20.
22. Fowlie 1961, p. 256.
23. Ellison 2010, p. 26.
24. Cameron 1953, p. 380.
25. Fowlie 1961, p. 257.
26. Bastid-Bruguière 2014, p. 17.
27. Watt 1989, p. 467-468.
28. Watt 1989, p. 617.
29. Cameron 1953, p. 378-379.
30. Jackson 1990, p. 191-193.
31. Loichot 2007, p. 98.
32. Duroselle 2004, p. xxxviii.
33. Duroselle 2004, p. xxxix.
34. Duroselle 2004, p. xxxxl.
35. Bastid-Bruguière 2014, p. 17-18.
36. Bastid-Bruguière 2014, p. 18.
37. Cameron 1953, p. 383.
38. Cameron 1953, p. 385.
39. Duroselle 2004, p. 72.
40. Cameron 1953, p. 386.
41. Cameron 1953, p. 384.
42. Duroselle 2004, p. 41.
43. Cairns 1998, p. 285.
44. Duroselle 2004, p. 102.
45. Duroselle 2004, p. 103.
46. Duroselle 2004, p. 110.
47. Duroselle 2004, p. 111.
48. Cameron 1953, p. 389.
49. Cameron 1953, p. 389-390.
50. Cameron 1953, p. 390.
51. Sullivan 1999, p. 190.
52. Sullivan 1999, p. 183.
53. Cameron 1953, p. 390-391.
54. Cameron 1953, p. 391.
55. May, Ernest Strange Victory, New York: Hill & Wang, 2000, p. 150.
56. Brownell & Billings 1987, p. 189.
57. Cameron 1953, p. 391-392.
58. Thomas 1999, p. 131.
59. Taylor 1979, p. 516.
60. Duroselle 2004, p. 303.
61. Duroselle 2004, p. 303-304.
62. Payne 1989, p. 328.
63. Cameron 1953, p. 395.
64. Watt 1989, p. 73.
65. Graebner & Bennett 2011, p. 193.
66. Duroselle 2004, p. 311.
67. Adamthwaite 1977, p. 290.
68. Watt 1989, p. 75.
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70. Watt 1989, p. 179.
71. Young 1998, p. 265.
72. Adamthwaite 1977, p. 316-317.
73. Watt 1989, p. 259.
74. Duroselle 2004, p. 492.
75. Brownell & Billings 1987, p. 233.
76. Brownell & Billings 1987, p. 233-234.
77. Carley 1999, p. 132.
78. Alexander 1992, p. 305.
79. Alexander 1992, p. 308.
80. Alexander 1992, p. 309.
81. Alexander 1992, p. 309-310.
82. Watt 1989, p. 390.
83. Watt 1989, p. 246.
84. Watt 1989, p. 246-247.
85. Cameron 1953, p. 397.
86. Keylor 1998, p. 268.
87. Cameron 1953, p. 397-398.
88. Cameron 1953, p. 398.
89. Watt 1989, p. 423.
90. Carley 1999, p. 174-175.
91. Watt 1989, p. 421.
92. Duroselle 2004, p. 357.
93. Duroselle 2004, p. 357=357.
94. Duroselle 2004, p. 360.
95. Watt 1989, p. 467.
96. Watt 1989, p. 468.
97. Duroselle 2004, p. 363.
98. Watt 1989, p. 499.
99. Watt 1989, p. 544.
100. Watt 1989, p. 540.
101. Cameron 1953, p. 399.
102. Watt 1989, p. 599.
103. Watt 1989, p. 599-600.
104. Watt 1989, p. 600.
105. Carswell 2019, p. 59.
106. Carswell 2019, p. 60.
107. Cairns 1998, p. 288.
108. Cameron 1953, p. 402.
109. Cameron 1953, p. 403.
110. Little 2001, p. 11.
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Books
Adamthwaite, Anthony (1977). France and the Coming of the Second World War. London:
Frank Cass.
Alexander, Martin S. (1992). The Republic in Danger General Maurice Gamelin and the
Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-
0-521-52429-2.
Bastid-Bruguière, Marguerite (2014). "France's Deluded Quest for Allies: Safeguarding
Territorial Sovereignty and the Balance of Power in East Asia". In Hans van de Ven; Diana
Lary; Stephen R. MacKinnon (eds.). Negotiating China's Destiny in World War II. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. pp. 11–34. ISBN 978-0-8047-9311-7.
Brownell, Will; Billings, Richard (1987). So Close to Greatness: The Biography of William C.
Bullitt. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-02-517410-X.
Cairns, John (1998). "Reflections on France, Britain and the Winter War Problem, 1939–
1940". In Joel Blatt (ed.). The French Defeat of 1940 Reassessments. Providence, Rhode
Island: Berghahn Books. pp. 269–285.
Cameron, Elizabeth (1953). "Alexis Saint-Léger-Léger". In Gordon A. Craig & Felix Gilbert
(ed.). The Diplomats 1919–1939. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 378–405.
Carswell, Richard (2019). The Fall of France in the Second World War History and Memory.
Oxford: Springer Publishing. ISBN 978-3-030-03955-4.
Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of
World War II. Ivan Dee: Chicago.
Ellison, David (2010). A Reader's Guide to Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-78909-7.
Fowlie, Wallace (January 1961). "In Tribute to Saint-John Perse". Poetry. 98 (4): 255–259.
Fuller, Pierre (2022). Modern Erasures Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping
of China's Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-316-51572-3.
Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste (2004). France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French
Diplomacy 1932–1939. New York: Enigma Books.
Graebner, Norman A.; Bennett, Norman (2011). The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy The
Failure of the Wilsonian Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-
49948-4.
Jackson, Julien (1990). The Popular Front in France Defending Democracy, 1934–38.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-31252-3.
 Keylor, William (1998). "France and the Illusion of American Support 1919–1940". In Joel
Blatt (ed.). The French Defeat of 1940 Reassessments. Providence, Rhode Island:
Berghahn Books. pp. 204–244.
Little, Marie (2001). The Poet and the Diplomat The Correspondence of Dag Hammarskjöld
and Alexis Leger. Syracuse: cUniversity Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-2925-2.
Loichot, Valérie (2007). Orphan Narratives The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner,
Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse. Richmond: University of Virginia Press.
ISBN 978-0-8139-2641-4.
Payne, Robert (1989). The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. Dorchester: Dorset Press.
ISBN 978-0-88029-402-7.
Sullivan, Barry (1999). "More than meets the eye: the Ethiopian War and the Origins of the
Second World War" ". In Gordon Martel (ed.). The Origins of the Second World War
Reconsidered A.J.P. Taylor and the Historians. London: Routledge. pp. 178–203.
Taylor, Telford (1979). Munich The Price of Peace. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-
02053-4.
Thomas, Martin (1999). "France and the Czechoslovak Crisis". In Igor Lukes; Erik Goldstein
(eds.). The Munich Crisis, 1938 Prelude to World War II (https://archive.org/details/munichcri
sis193800igor). London: Frank Cass. pp. 122 (https://archive.org/details/munichcrisis19380
0igor/page/122)–159.
Young, Robert (1998). "In the Eye of the Beholder: The Cultural Representation of France
and Germany in the New York Times, 1939–1940". In Joel Blatt (ed.). The French Defeat of
1940 Reassessments. Providence, Rhode Island: Berghahn Books. pp. 245–268.
Watt, Donald Cameron (1989). How War Came The Immediate Origins of the Second World
War, 1938–1939. London: Heinemann.

External links
Fondation Saint-John Perse, Aix-en-Provence (http://www.fondationsaintjohnperse.fr/),
Website of the Aix-en-Provence Fondation about the poet and diplomat (in French)
Saint-John Perse (https://www.nobelprize.org/laureate/631) on Nobelprize.org
Saint-John Perse, le poète aux masques (http://www.sjperse.org/), site devoted to the
author (in French)
Liste de diffusion SJPinfo (news) (http://listes.u-picardie.fr/wws/info/sjpinfo) devoted to
Saint-John Perse

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