18 June 1940

18 June 1940 is the date of the call to arms by Charles de Gaulle that Romain Gary recalls as a decisive summons to continue fighting after France’s defeat. Its force for Gary was both political and intimate: he responded to the General’s appeal, but heard in it, too, the voice of his mother and the ideal of France she had formed in him.

A France imagined in childhood

Long before the broadcast, Gary’s mother had made France vivid to him from their home in Lithuania. She told him its history and legends as if they belonged to a fairy tale, joining the country’s beauty to her smile and the comfort of her embrace. Through stories of Jeanne d’Arc, the Bastille, La Fontaine, and French liberty, France became not merely a country but a cherished inheritance. Gary later described this upbringing as a kind of protective Maginot Line of patriotic certainties, built around him before the French General Staff constructed defenses on the nation’s borders.

That ideal also shaped his sense of what he might become. His mother repeatedly predicted that he would be an Ambassador of France, insisting on the distinction of the post. Years earlier, as he searched for a promising pseudonym, he had considered a succession of grand names without finding one that satisfied her imagined future for him. When he later heard the name Charles de Gaulle on the radio, he recognized, with rueful hindsight, that it would have pleased her as a pseudonym. The thought made the broadcast resonate with the long, intimate history of her ambitions for him.

The broadcast and the response

After the fall of France, Gary heard Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms over London radio on 18 June 1940. He says that he rallied without hesitation. What moved him was not only the General’s appeal: the voice of the old woman who had sold hats at Number 16, Grand Pohulanka, was present in the call as well. The broadcast thus joined public resistance to private memory. The country his mother had described in the Lithuanian forest seemed to speak through a leader asking the defeated to continue the struggle.

Gary’s immediate response stands against his earlier inattention to events in Europe. Before the crisis, he had found it difficult to hate anyone for long and had not understood Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as a threat. France’s silence under Hitler’s threats seemed to him evidence of calm strength, and he trusted the French Army and its revered leaders. His mother’s faith had furnished him with confidence, but also left him unprepared for the possibility of defeat. The call made that inherited attachment an active allegiance.

From patriotic certainty to a more complex belonging

The broadcast’s meaning was sharpened by the gap between the France Gary had imagined and the country he encountered. He later recalled that his mother’s idealized vision collided violently with France’s contradictory reality, yet he could not simply discard the fairy tale. Her devotion and Charles de Gaulle’s appeal belonged, for him, to the same emotional register, even though they came from people radically unlike one another.

That allegiance did not mean that Gary’s belonging went unquestioned. At a later point, when he was rejected for a flying-officer commission, he was told that he had been failed because he was Russian-born and his naturalization was too recent; the eligibility rule concerned French birth or more than ten years since naturalization. The exclusion painfully altered his understanding of assimilation. He came to feel truly French not because France had proved flawless, but because he recognized that the French, too, could be unjust and ridiculous, and that they were human beings like everyone else. This later realization complicates the childhood certainty behind his response in 1940: attachment to France endures, but it no longer depends on imagining the nation as a realm of superior beings.

Narrative significance

In Gary’s recollection, 18 June 1940 is both a historical call to resistance and a meeting point between two voices: Charles de Gaulle’s and his mother’s. The date gathers together the stories through which she had taught him to imagine France, his belated recognition of the name that might have fulfilled her dream, and his decision to rally after defeat. Its lasting significance lies in that fusion of personal memory and public allegiance, as well as in the later recognition that love of country need not require blindness to its failures.