Romain Gary Plans to Assassinate Hitler but Abandons the Plan

Romain Gary’s planned assassination of Adolf Hitler was a near-action shaped by his mother’s extravagant vision of his destiny and ended by her sudden fear of losing him. Recalled as an episode from 1938, the plan sent him from Nice toward a mission in Germany that he did not want to undertake, though he could not bear to disappoint his mother. He prepared as if the journey might end in his death; on its eve, his mother pleaded with him to give it up. The decisive exchange turns a fantasy of public heroism into a private negotiation over a paid train ticket—and leaves the assassination unattempted.

Background and the Mother’s Plan

Gary places the episode after his return from Sweden and before entering the Air Force Academy. He had come back to Nice disheartened: he had given up hope of recovering Brigitte, and Brigitte’s husband’s behavior had deepened his sense of having been passed over after all that his mother had promised. He expected to spend his remaining weeks at home before beginning military training. Instead, his homecoming became the occasion for a plan that would propel him toward Berlin.

His mother greeted him not with the tears and embraces he had anticipated, but with sobs so intense that he wondered about her health. She told him that her diabetes was controlled and the family business was flourishing, yet the tears continued. Only after leading him into the empty restaurant and sitting with him at their usual corner table did she explain what she had in mind: he was to go to Berlin and kill Hitler, thereby saving France and civilization and becoming the champion of the world.

She had, in her account, already anticipated the possible consequences. Even if Gary were captured, she imagined, France, England, and America would demand his release under threat of war. Germany would be thrown into confusion, and he would return to Paris as a national hero. The scale of this forecast made the mission less a practical political plan than a role prepared for her son: he was to become the shining hero whose achievement would fulfill her expectations.

Reluctance and Preparation

Gary did not greet the proposal with immediate enthusiasm. He had recently completed ten jobs, many unpleasant, and felt that he had already given the best of himself. The prospect of traveling third class to Berlin in the heat of summer, enduring a sleepless journey on a hard bench, then waiting in the streets for Hitler to appear, held little appeal. He would rather have stayed by the Mediterranean, to which he says he could not remain away for long without fretting, and would have preferred to postpone the mission until October. But his reluctance did not become refusal: disappointing his mother was not, for him, a real option. In her account of what he was to become, he was already committed to the heroic role.

He then made practical preparations. He considered himself a good pistol shot, though out of practice, and recalled that the training he had received in Lieutenant Sverdlovski’s gymnasium still enabled him to impress friends at fairgrounds. He took his revolver from the family box in the cellar and went to arrange his ticket. News that Hitler was at Berchtesgaden improved his view of the destination: the Bavarian Alps seemed preferable to Berlin in mid-July. The change in location did not alter the purpose of the journey, but it did offer a more agreeable setting for carrying it out.

The preparations also acknowledged that his mother’s confidence could not guarantee his safety. Gary put his manuscripts in order because he was unsure he would survive, and wrote farewell letters to the women he loved. He oiled the pistol and borrowed a jacket from a heavier friend so that he could conceal it more comfortably. These details mark the distance between his mother’s assured forecast of triumph and his own more cautious expectation: he prepared both for the act and for the possibility of not returning.

The final forty-eight hours were shadowed by ordinary discomforts and distractions. Gary was irritable in the exceptional heat and found the Mediterranean and the Swedish girls on Grande Bleue Beach especially appealing after months apart. He was also startled to learn that the German railways offered him a thirty-percent discount for holiday travelers. To avoid intestinal trouble that his mother might interpret as unheroic, he limited his consumption of dill pickles before departure. The juxtaposition is characteristic of the episode: an imagined mission to change history proceeds alongside ticket prices, food, weather, and the narrator’s resistance to an exhausting journey.

The Reversal on the Eve of Departure

On the eve of the planned journey, Gary took what he understood would be his last swim at Grande Bleue and looked emotionally at the last smiles of Sweden. Returning from the beach, he found his mother crumpled in an armchair. She clasped her hands, went down on her knees, and begged him to abandon the project. Her appeal recast the mission she had devised as an intolerable demand on an only son, and presented her as a frightened mother rather than the confident architect of a future national hero.

Gary says he was not astonished. He understood her and described himself as having been conditioned by her for a long time. His response was not a declaration of political doubt or a challenge to the plan’s logic; he told her he had already paid for his ticket. That practical objection brought an immediate change in her expression. She regained her fierce resolve, grasped her stick, and announced that the railway would have to refund the money. The exchange ends the plan through a small, concrete reversal: the mission had been made possible by the mother’s insistence, and it was withdrawn when she insisted on recovering her son.

Gary’s conclusion is that he did not kill Hitler, though the possibility had come close. The episode is presented as a plan abandoned before the intended journey and assassination, not as a failed attempt at the act itself. Its significance lies in the collision between a grand heroic script and the intimate attachment that first produced it and then stopped it.

Retrospective and Narrative Significance

Gary notes that no mention of the episode had appeared in the press. Its existence reaches the reader through his retrospective account, which identifies the plan as a private, unpublicized episode rather than a public operation. The story’s suspense therefore comes not from an actual encounter with Hitler but from the preparations, the approaching departure, and the last-minute reversal at home.

The account also places the episode beside Gary’s impending entry into the Air Force Academy. His mother’s vision of his military greatness had taken an unexpected turn: instead of waiting for his future uniform and rank, she cast him in advance as a savior whose single act would rescue France and civilization. Gary’s participation is real in the limited but consequential sense that he arranged travel, readied his weapon, and prepared farewell letters; his reluctance is equally explicit. The story holds these facts together without turning the plan into a completed deed.

The final exchange condenses the episode’s irony. A mission framed in the language of world history is halted by the cost of a ticket, and the mother who had confidently imagined international pressure securing her son’s release cannot bear to send him away. Her reversal does not erase the seriousness of his preparations, but it exposes the personal bond beneath the heroic scenario. What remains is not a public triumph but an abandoned plan, preserved in the narrator’s account as a moment when his mother’s ambition and fear briefly pulled him in opposite directions.