page_title: Saint-John Perse
section_title: Diplomatic service
hierarchical_section_title: Saint-John Perse / Diplomatic service
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Münchener Abkommen, Staatschefs Zentralbild Das Münchner Abkommen vom 29.9.1938. Das am 29.9.1938 in München zwischen dem britischen Ministerpräsidenten Neville Chamberlain, dem französischen Ministerpräsidenten Edouard Daladier, dem italienischen Staatschef Benito Mussolini und Adolf Hitler geschlossene Abkommen ermächtigte das faschistische Deutschland zur Annexion tschechoslowakischen Gebietes. UBz: von links: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, und der italienische Außenminister Graf Galeazzo Ciano. Im Hintergrund v.l.n.r. Unbekannter (wahrscheinlich ein brite Diplomat), Fromageot, Ribbentrop, Weizsäcker, Leger alias Saint-John Perse. 12 766-38 [Scherl Bilderdienst] Abgebildete Personen: Neville Chamberlain, Premierminister, Großbritannien Graf Galeazzo Ciano, Außenminister, Italien (GND 119178362) Édouard Daladier, Ministerpräsident, Vorsitzender Sozialistische Partei, Frankreich Henri Fromageot, Diplomat, Frankreich Adolf Hitler, Reichskanzler, Deutschland Alexis Leger alias Saint-John Perse, Generalsekretär des Aussenministeriums, auch Dichter, Schriftsteller und Nobelpreisträger für Literatur, Frankreich Benito Mussolini, Ministerpräsident, Regierungschef, Chef des Faschistischen Großrates, Italien Joachim von Ribbentrop, deutscher Außenminister Freiherr Ernst von Weizsäcker, Diplomat, Staatssekretär im Auswärtigen Amt, SS-Führer, Deutschland Information added by Wikimedia users.Русский: После подписаний Мюнхенских соглашений 1938 года. Слева направо: Чемберлен, Даладье, Гитлер, Муссолини, Чиано.
context_page_description: Saint-John Perse was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
context_section_description: 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. From 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French embassy in Peking. 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.
  Leger was warm to classical music and knew Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, and Les Six.
  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. After Briand's death in 1932, Leger served as the General Secretary of the French Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay) until 1940.
  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. He accompanied the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier at the Munich Conference in 1938, where the cession of part of Czechoslovakia to Germany was agreed to. He was dismissed from his post right after the Fall of France in May 1940, as he was a known anti-Nazi. In mid-July 1940, Leger began a long exile in Washington, DC.
caption: Saint-John Perse attends the negotiations for the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938. He stands behind Mussolini, right.
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