Appeal of 18 June

The Appeal of 18 June is remembered by Romain Gary as a turning point in which a public call to arms met a private education in patriotism. On 18 June 1940, after France’s defeat, he heard Charles de Gaulle’s appeal over the London radio and rallied without hesitation. In the memory’s most intimate reversal, the voice that summoned him was the General’s and, just as powerfully, his mother’s: France had first reached him as a story told in her love.

Before the Broadcast: A France Told as a Legend

His response had been prepared long before the radio sounded. Raised in a Lithuanian forest, Gary learned to imagine France through his mother’s accounts of its history and ideals. She made the country vivid through stories of Jeanne d’Arc, French fables, and a child’s campaign to take the Bastille with a wooden sword. France entered his childhood like a fairy tale, associated with his mother’s smile and the security of being held by her. He later acknowledged that this upbringing left him little choice but to become a Francophile.

That idealized attachment also shaped what he could recognize as a threat. Gary says he had paid little attention to events in Europe and, having been surrounded by a woman’s love, found it difficult to hate anyone for long. He did not understand Hitler and the Nazis. France’s silence in response to Hitler’s threats seemed to him evidence of calm strength, not a reason for alarm; he trusted the French Army and its revered leaders. His mother had surrounded him with patriotic certainties so secure that, as he recalled, he did not learn of France’s defeat in 1870 until he was a student at a lycée in Nice.

The Call and Its Immediate Meaning

Against that sheltered confidence, the defeat of France and the appeal from London marked a decisive change in the story he tells. Gary recalls hearing Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms on 18 June 1940 and rallying to it immediately. He presents no hesitation or intervening calculation: the appeal reached him at the point where the France he had imagined could no longer be separated from the country facing defeat.

The memory gives the call a double source of authority. Gary says that he rallied to the old woman who sold hats as much as to the General’s words. His mother’s devotion to France and Charles de Gaulle’s appeal sounded to him in the same register, despite the difference between them in physical presence and public stature. The broadcast therefore does more than announce a political summons. In Gary’s recollection, it joins a national call to the intimate voice that had taught him what France was worth defending.

The Name That Came Too Late

Years later, the appeal also returned to him as a missed opportunity in his search for a suitable pseudonym. When he first heard Charles de Gaulle’s name on the day of the broadcast, Gary reproached himself for not having thought of it about fifteen years earlier. He imagined that his mother would have approved, especially if he had written the name with one l, evoking the ancient Gaul she regarded as the mother of France. The retrospective joke links the General’s name to the childhood ambition that his own name should be beautiful and promising enough to fulfil her dream for him.

This recollection turns a moment of wartime decision into a hinge between the boy his mother had imagined and the man who heard the appeal. The name that might once have served as a literary identity now belonged to a public figure whose call drew Gary into the struggle. The irony is personal rather than merely verbal: the son had spent years searching for a name to satisfy his mother, only to encounter, amid France’s defeat, one that already seemed to contain her ideal.

Belonging and Its Later Complications

The appeal’s emotional welcome did not erase the difficulties of Gary’s place in France. At the Air Force school, he was later told that he had failed because he had been born in Russia and his naturalization was too recent. A rule for flying officers required French-born parents or more than ten years since naturalization; although the rule had previously been criticized and was not always applied, it had returned. The episode exposed a gap between the French identity to which Gary had rallied and the formal conditions imposed on his eligibility.

Gary describes a painful blow there as producing an unexpected change: from then on, he felt truly French, as though he had been assimilated by a magic wand. That later recognition was not simply a return to his childhood’s flawless patriotic picture. He came to see the French as neither a separate race nor a class of superior beings, but as people capable of foolishness and injustice, like others. In retrospect, the Appeal of 18 June stands at the beginning of a more complicated belonging: devotion first formed by his mother’s legend, then tested by defeat, institutional exclusion, and his recognition of France’s contradictory human faces.