D'Azur Et De Sable

Marcel Migeo is a big name in the heroic epoch of French aviation, even though he is not as famous as Mermoz, Guillaumet or Saint-Exupéry – he knew all three of them. Refusing a path all mapped-out as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance, he chose aviation because of his taste for travel and adventure. In January 1923, he left for Syria, sent there as a fighter pilot in the 53rd Escadrille of the Levant, based at Deir-ez-zor. On a Breguet XIV he took part in peace keeping operations in Syria, earning himself the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille du Levant and bar. Each day he wrote down the important events of his daily life in his moleskin notebook: his flying missions, his relations with the local population, his discovery of Syrian towns and countryside. These notes gave rise to a manuscript, unpublished until today. He became an insurance broker in his native city, Reims. Marcel Migeo wrote ten or so books most of which were devoted to flying. We owe him accounts of the war, like Batailles dans le ciel (Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Aéro-Club de France) and biographies of Saint-Exupéry, Henri Guillaumet, Maryse Bastié and Dider Daurat. Almost a hundred years later, his writings on Syria have a pertinent and astonishingly contemporary flavour since the country is being torn apart by a six-year-old civil war which has taken on an international dimension. The journalist and writer, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, himself from Reims, has written the preface to this book as a tribute to the memory of Marcel Migeo whom he knew and whose tales of youth in turn have something to do with developing his own interest in that heroic period of aviation.