Anna Calls for Continued Resistance at the Buffa Market

Anna’s call for continued resistance at the Buffa Market was a public outburst of patriotism that anticipated Charles de Gaulle’s appeal by two or three days. Delivered in mid-June 1940 while her son was away in Meknès, it transformed the idealized France she had taught him to love into an urgent demand to resist defeat—and left him feeling both summoned by her example and ashamed that he had not become the hero she proclaimed.

The France Behind the Appeal

Anna’s attachment to France had been formed in the stories she told her son. In the Lithuanian forest, she presented the country through legends, patriotic history, and the fables of La Fontaine, making French feel like his mother tongue before he had lived in France. He recalled that her France was a fairy tale, a vision so deeply associated with her face and affection that later experience could not dislodge it.

The son understood that this inherited certainty had also shaped his view of danger. Before the war, he trusted the French Army and its leaders, and interpreted France’s silence in the face of Hitler’s threats as calm strength. His mother had built around him, in his telling, a Maginot Line of patriotic certainties. He later acknowledged that he had paid little attention to events in Europe and had not understood the enemy; her confidence had helped make the prospect of defeat seem almost inconceivable.

The Rally at the Market

The appeal took place on June 15 or 16, 1940, at the vegetable stand of Mr. Pantaleoni in the Buffa Market. According to the narrator, some twenty people later described the scene to him. Anna stood on a chair among the carrots, beetroots, and lettuces, brandishing her cane and urging those present to reject the armistice and continue the fight from England and North Africa, alongside her son.

She presented that son as already a famous writer and diplomat who was dealing the enemy mortal blows. To support the grand claim, she opened her bag and showed the crowd a page cut from a weekly magazine containing one of his short stories. The small clipping made the scene especially poignant: she tried to turn his limited literary achievement into proof of the heroic future she had always predicted for him. The narrator recognizes that people may have laughed, but directs his reproach inward, regretting that he had not become the person she wanted to show them.

A Call Heard from Afar

The narrator was not at the market. After the flying school moved to Meknès, he and the other trainees learned that the armistice had been accepted by the North African authorities and that aircraft had been grounded following attempts by crews to reach Gibraltar. His mother responded with fury, urging him to act and summoning the sons of France to rally to the flag. He describes her market speech as occurring before Charles de Gaulle broadcast his appeal from London on June 18.

As he wandered through the Medina of Meknès, trying to escape his exhaustion and distress, his mother’s voice remained present to him. In retrospect, he understands those solitary hours as a turning point: her forceful, dramatic nature prevailed over his own uncertainty, and he felt her qualities become part of him. The scene thus reaches beyond the market itself. Her call was a public act he witnessed only through others’ accounts, but its emotional force accompanied him in Meknès as he faced the defeat and the demand to choose what to do next.

Maternal Patriotism and Its Consequences

The rally condensed a lifelong bond between Anna’s love of France and her expectations for her son. From the age of eight, she had assured him in difficult times that he would become an Ambassador of France. Her market speech enlarged that private prophecy into a public performance: she imagined him as a celebrated writer and diplomat already fighting the enemy, and used his published story as evidence. The difference between her picture and his own sense of failure made the episode painful as well as stirring.

The narrator also places her voice alongside Charles de Gaulle’s. After the fall of France, he says, the June 18 broadcast rallied him not only through the General’s words but through the memory of the woman who had spoken of France in the same tone. The market appeal therefore stands as both a precursor to the broadcast and an intimate source of his response to it: before a national call reached him from London, his mother had already insisted that defeat must not be accepted.