The Appeal for Resistance of 18 June 1940

The Appeal for Resistance of 18 June 1940 was Charles de Gaulle’s call from London for French people to continue the fight after France’s defeat. In the narrator’s memoir, its force lies not only in the political summons but in the voice he hears within it: the voice of his mother, who had made France a cherished ideal long before it became a country at war. The appeal turns that childhood inheritance into a reason to rally, while the narrator’s later experience of exclusion complicates what it means to belong to the nation he had been taught to love.

The Appeal and the Mother’s Earlier Call

Charles de Gaulle made his appeal on 18 June 1940, calling on French people to continue the struggle. The narrator recalls hearing it after France’s fall and rallying without hesitation. He describes the moment as a response to two voices at once: the General’s and that of his mother, who had sold hats at Number 16, Grand Pohulanka. The political call and the maternal one are distinct, yet in his memory they converge; he does not present his decision as a response to public leadership alone.

His mother had already made her own appeal a few days earlier. Around 15 or 16 June, at the Buffa Market, she stood on a chair beside Mr. Pantaleoni’s vegetable stand, brandished her cane, and urged people to reject the armistice and continue the war from England and North Africa. She called on them to stand with her son, whom she imagined as a famous writer and diplomat already striking mortal blows against the enemy. To support that picture, she showed the crowd a page from a weekly containing one of his stories. The narrator did not witness the scene; he says that about twenty people later described it to him. He remembers it with tears, recognizing both the public embarrassment and the scale of the hope his mother had invested in him.

France as a Childhood Inheritance

The appeal’s intimate resonance is prepared by the narrator’s account of growing up with France as a kind of fairy tale. In the Lithuanian forest, his mother told him its legends as though they belonged beside familiar children’s stories. Her affection made the country visible to him through her smile and loving whisper; stories of Jeanne d’Arc, the Bastille, and French literature turned national history into a child’s imaginative world. His early sense that French was his mother tongue and that France embodied liberty was, in his telling, learned through maternal storytelling rather than formed at a distance from it.

He later recognized that this idealized picture collided with the country’s turbulent and contradictory reality. Yet the fairy tale remained difficult to relinquish. When Charles de Gaulle called for resistance, the narrator heard his mother’s voice as part of the appeal precisely because her France had already become the emotional language through which he understood the country. The memoir thus presents the broadcast not as an isolated political message but as the public echo of an earlier, private formation of national feeling.

Patriotism, Certainty, and War

The narrator also connects that upbringing to his failure, at first, to understand the danger posed by Hitler and the Nazis. He says he had paid little attention to events in Europe and suggests that being surrounded by a woman’s love had left him unable to hate anyone for long. His mother’s patriotic stories had furnished him with what he calls a Maginot Line of certainties: he trusted the French Army and its revered leaders, and the silence of France in the face of threats seemed to him a sign of strength rather than a cause for alarm. He had not even learned of France’s defeat in 1870 until he attended the lycée in Nice; his mother had left it out of her account.

This account makes the appeal a threshold between inherited confidence and the realities of war, not proof that the narrator had already understood those realities. He describes a deep resistance to treating slaughter as an acceptable solution and says that, even when he killed in wartime, he did so without enthusiasm or satisfaction. His response to the call to continue fighting therefore coexists with a stated aversion to hatred and killing. The memoir holds those positions together rather than presenting patriotism as uncomplicated consent to violence.

Belonging and Its Limits

The narrator’s later experience in the French Air Force exposes a contradiction that the appeal itself cannot resolve. When he asks why he had failed, he is told that he was Russian-born, had been naturalized only three years earlier, and faced a rule restricting eligibility to become a flying officer to those with French parents or more than ten years of naturalization. The rule, he is told, had been criticized in Parliament as undemocratic, discriminatory, and racist, but was being applied again. His insistence that he was French meets pity rather than acceptance.

He recalls this exclusion as a painful blow that unexpectedly made him feel truly French, as though he had been assimilated by it. The realization was not that the French were superior or a people apart, but that they could be foolish and unjust like anyone else: they, too, were his brothers. France appeared to him as a country of many different faces, and he had to choose which of them resembled the France his mother had described. Read alongside the appeal, this later change gives the call’s meaning a sharper edge. The nation he rallied to was at once the ideal his mother had nurtured, the cause for which he chose to fight, and a society whose institutions could still question his claim to belong.