On Pillories and Plane Crashes: Why July 31st Keeps Humbling the Powerful

By Andy — 2026-08-01 — Literary News

July 31st is a lousy birthday for political enemies. Or a very good one, depending on your view of irony.

Three hundred and twenty-three years ago, Daniel Defoe stood in a London pillory for seditious libel. His crime: a pamphlet so clever that everyone misread it. "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was meant as mockery—a grotesque exaggeration of High Church arguments taken to absurd lengths. Except nobody laughed. Both sides thought he was serious. Both sides wanted him hanged.

The verdict: a fine, imprisonment, and three days exposed on a wooden frame in public view. Standard humiliation protocol for the 1700s.

What wasn't standard: the crowd's response. The onlookers, who often pelted offenders with rotten food or worse, threw only flowers. They garlanded the structure. They sold copies of Defoe's poem—written in prison, mind you—from the streets. They drank to his health while soldiers held back the mob from overwhelming the pillory with more affection.

The state tried to break him. The people turned it into a festival.

In 1944, on the same calendar date, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took off from Corsica for a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. He took off the night of July 31, 1944, and was never seen again.

The man who wrote children's books about roses and deserts, who understood loneliness better than most adults, simply vanished into Mediterranean air.

The mystery persists. Some say a German pilot shot him down—though no wreckage proved it for decades. A fisherman found a bracelet in 1998. Investigators found nothing conclusive. All they could determine was that the aircraft entered the water vertically around 500 mph.

Fast.

That's the difference, actually—and maybe I'm overreaching here—but Defoe got flowers because he survived to see them. The state's plan misfired. The punishment became proof of something larger. Saint-Exupéry got silence because the state made sure he wouldn't come back to see anything.

One man faced power and walked away to become a legend. The other faced power and disappeared entirely.

Both happened on July 31st. Both involved writers who refused to shut up. One was sentenced to a pillar in the town square. One was sentenced to the Mediterranean.

I'm not sure what the internet age does with these stories. Defoe got real flowers. We get hashtags. Same intent—different medium—but flowers are heavier.

The source article in Lit Hub Daily mentions Saint-Exupéry because we're eighty-two years out from that morning. Mentions Defoe because some dates simply accumulate weight over time. Both anniversaries sharing a single day is either bad luck or the universe's idea of pattern recognition.

What sticks: the flowers stayed on the ground. The plane never came down in any place anyone could touch.