Romain Gary Enlists in the French Air Force and Enters Flight School

Romain Gary’s enlistment in the French Air Force and entry into flight school mark the passage from his mother’s idealized vision of national service to a bruising encounter with military institutions. The episode begins with a public departure, proceeds through delayed training in aircraft already ill-suited to modern war, and culminates in the discovery that his recent naturalization barred him from the officer’s status he had expected. The rejection wounds him, but also alters his understanding of belonging: he comes to feel truly French not because the institution accepts him, but because its injustice makes France’s contradictions impossible to ignore.

The promise of service

His decision to pursue military aviation grew within a childhood shaped by his mother’s devotion to France as Gary serves and fights for. In her stories, the country was a fairy-tale realm, its history and heroes made intimate through the warmth of her voice. Gary later recognized that this upbringing had formed his attachment before he could judge the country for himself. When he heard Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms after the fall of France, the appeal reached him not only as a general’s summons but also as an echo of his mother’s convictions. The enlistment therefore belonged to a longer emotional education: military service seemed to join personal loyalty, maternal expectation, and an imagined national ideal.

The hopes surrounding his future in uniform were especially strong at home. His mother expected him to become an officer, and Gary understood that the prospect gave her a vision of triumph after years of hardship. The uniform was more than a career milestone in her imagination; it would embody the dignity and success she had long predicted for him. Yet the memoir’s retrospective account places that hope beside a much larger contradiction. As a young man, Gary trusted the French Army and its leaders, while acknowledging that his mother had sheltered him from troubling historical knowledge, including the defeat of 1870. He entered service with faith in the institution, not with a settled understanding of its failures.

Departure from Salon-de-Provence

Gary was inducted at Salon-de-Provence on November 4, 1938. Friends and relatives gathered at the station as the conscripts prepared to leave, but his mother alone brought a tricolor flag and waved it while calling out patriotic encouragement. The display drew hostile looks and mocking remarks from a class of recruits notably short on military enthusiasm. One recruit objected to the spectacle by saying that she was not French. Gary, himself angered and nearly frantic at his mother’s exuberance, seized on the insult as an outlet for his feelings and struck the young man. A general fight broke out on the train as it began to move, amid shouts against the Army and accusations of treachery. Gary briefly reached the window to wave farewell before returning to the brawl.

The scene holds departure and escape together. He was leaving his mother, whose pride made the moment emotionally charged, while the fight offered a way to avoid remaining inside that feeling. His mother’s flag continued to flutter on the platform as the train pulled away; inside, the recruits’ anger made visible the distance between her ceremonial patriotism and their skepticism about military service. Gary’s own response was divided: he resented her display, yet the insult directed at her provoked immediate violence. The episode anticipates the conflict that would shape his experience at flight school, where the meaning of being French would be tested more severely than it had been at the station.

The delay and the work of training

Gary expected his certificate of advanced military preparation and law degree to open the way directly to officers’ flight school. Instead, he remained at Salon-de-Provence for nearly six weeks without orders. Repeated inquiries and formal representations produced only shrugs: the officers and noncommissioned officers had received no instructions concerning him. Lieutenant Barbier eventually took an interest in the case and supported his protests. Gary was then told to report to Avord airbase, arriving a full month late and having missed almost a third of the course. He did not treat the delay as a reason to give up. Getting there, at last, mattered most, and he set himself to recover the lost ground.

The training demanded both technical study and physical immersion in the flying world. Gary struggled with compass theory, but made up time; his marks were generally average, with stronger results in flying and infantry leadership. He found that in the latter role he could draw on an authority of word and gesture that recalled his mother’s own forcefulness. His affection for flying was bound up with the material details of an earlier aviation: open cockpits, primitive instruments, and a wide scope for individual initiative. Cadets struggled into heavy, one-piece leather suits, then crossed the muddy airfield helmeted, gloved, and wearing goggles before climbing into Potez-25 aircraft. The planes moved at roughly the pace of a draft horse, and the smell of oil remained vivid in Gary’s memory.

The methods of instruction made the school’s historical limitations tangible. A cadet might lean far out of an open bomber cockpit moving at about seventy miles per hour, or stand in the nose of a Leo-20 biplane to signal the pilot. Gary later contrasted this training with the Messerschmitt-110 and the approaching Battle of Britain: the French Air Force was preparing its men for a war resembling that of 1914, despite the radically different aircraft and conflict already on the horizon. The graduation parade approached with an apparently straightforward promise of advancement. Uniforms had been made, and the cadets would learn their ranks and choose postings according to their marks. Gary’s mother had borrowed five hundred francs from an old friend at the Buffa Market to pay for his uniform. Gary, preoccupied with whether a short or long visor suited him, even tried to grow the small mustache then considered fashionable among pilots. The polished image of the future officer was ready before the institution revealed that it would not grant him the expected rank.

Exclusion and an altered sense of belonging

Gary learned that he had been flunked not because of his flying performance, but because he had not been born in France and his naturalization was too recent. He was told that a rule required a flight officer either to have French parents or to have been naturalized for more than ten years. Though the rule had been criticized in Parliament as discriminatory and undemocratic and was said not usually to be applied, it had been invoked against him. Gary’s immediate response was to insist, in substance, that he was French. The answer he received was dismissive, but the man who explained the decision remained angry on his behalf, apparently unwilling to accept the injustice as ordinary procedure.

The exclusion produced an unexpected reversal. Gary later said that the blow he received in connection with the episode made him feel, for the first time, truly French—as if the painful encounter had completed his assimilation. The experience broke the illusion that the French were a people apart or inherently superior. They, too, could be ridiculous, foolish, and unjust; they belonged to the same human mixture of admirable and repellent qualities as everyone else. Gary’s attachment to France did not disappear, but it became more discriminating. He could no longer let a flag decide his loyalties automatically; he had to look at the people who held it and choose among the country’s conflicting faces the ones that resembled the ideal his mother had taught him to love.

Narrative significance

The enlistment and flight-school episode turns a promised ascent into a test of identity. The tricolor at the station, the uniform paid for with borrowed money, and the open-cockpit Potez-25 belong to the concrete world of service; against them stands a nationality rule that makes Gary’s belonging conditional. His mother’s patriotism first appears embarrassing to him, then becomes inseparable from the attachment that carries him into service. The officer’s rejection does not settle the question of whether Gary is French. Instead, it changes the terms of the question, replacing inherited certainty with a deliberate choice of allegiance.

The memoir tells this episode retrospectively, as part of a life whose wartime actions would later give his mother’s hopes a different significance. Its central irony is already complete at Avord: the institution denies Gary the status he expected, while the humiliation helps him claim an identity that had previously rested on his mother’s stories. The young cadet’s confidence in the Army and the old aircraft’s obsolete methods are not merely discarded background; together they show how the ideal of service met a compromised reality. Flight school is thus both a beginning in military aviation and a formative encounter with the distance between national myth and national practice.