Terre des hommes, Riad Sattouf illustre Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Terre des hommes, Riad Sattouf illustrates Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Exhibition-sale from October 3 to December 23 , 2025

To mark the publication of the edition of Terre des hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry illustrated by Riad Sattouf, Galerie Gallimard is presenting an exhibition and sale of art prints from the book, drawn and signed by the artist.

The exhibition

“Illustrating Saint-Exupéry’s aviation novels has always been a secret dream,” confides Riad Sattouf, revealing a previously little-known aspect of his inspiration:

“For twenty years, a photographic portrait of him, taken at the end of his life, has hung in my office. He watches me draw, with his half-moon eyes. One morning, I realized that I had become older than him. And that’s when, strangely, I felt authorized. It’s an uplifting book. A deeply welcoming book. The almost mystical relentlessness of the Aéropostale pilots, the desert, brotherly friendship, action, death, the melancholy of existing and the wonder in the face of the beauty and brutality of nature… Encountering this book so young gave me the desire to live with a beating heart—and that’s wonderful, when you land on Earth!”

Drawings by Riad Sattouf, © Riad Sattouf, Les Impressions du Futur, 2025. Extract from the illustrated edition of Terre des hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, © Éditions Gallimard – Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939

Riad Sattouf's illustrations, illuminated by the spirit of adventure, humanist sentiment and the preserved emotion of childhood, are accompanied by exceptional archives around the writer-aviator and the French publication of Terre des hommes in 1939. They come from family and editorial collections: manuscript, unpublished corrected typescript, letters, photographs, autographed original editions...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in front of the wreck of his Caudron Simoun, Libyan Desert (Egypt), early January 1936. Photograph dedicated to [Louis-Daniel] Hirsch, commercial director of the NRF. © Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The archives of André Prévot, a mechanic who accompanied the writer on the famous Paris-Saigon raid in 1935, enrich this collection of documents, with very moving memories of their accident in Egypt, in the Libyan desert – the culmination of Terre des hommes and the poetic meditation of the writer on the meaning of existing: between dream and adventure, presence and absence, availability to the unknown and fidelity to one's own and to oneself .

When Riad Sattouf meets Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, it is an emotion that can be read as it is shown.

An exhibition presented by Éditions Gallimard, with the collaboration of Livres du futur, the Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the Charles-VII Museum in Mehun-sur-Yèvre.

Riad Sattouf

Riad Sattouf was born in 1978. A comic book author, his best-selling series are L'Arabe du futur and Les Cahiers d'Esther , which have sold several million copies worldwide and been translated into 25 languages.

He is one of the few authors to have twice won the Fauve d'Or for Best Album at the Angoulême Comics Festival and received the festival's Grand Prix for his entire body of work in 2023. He has directed two feature films: Les Beaux Gosses (2009), which won the César Award for Best First Film in 2010, and Jacky in the Kingdom of Girls (2014).