Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle is a briefly but decisively present figure in the narrator’s account: the General’s June 18, 1940 call to arms transforms a name once considered as a possible pseudonym into a voice of resistance. The narrator responds not only to the public appeal but also to its intimate echo of his mother, whose stories had made France an object of near-mythic devotion.

A Name That Arrived Too Late

Years before hearing of Charles de Gaulle, the narrator had searched endlessly for a pen name beautiful and promising enough to satisfy his mother’s ambitions for him. He considered names including Roland Campéador, Alain Brisar, Hubert de Longpré, and Romain Cortès, but none seemed to meet the ideal she had in mind. When he first heard the General’s name on the day of the London radio broadcast, he immediately regretted not having thought of it fifteen years earlier. He believed his mother would have admired the name, especially if written with one “l,” a spelling that would make it resemble the old Gaul he associated with the mother of France. The moment turns a public figure’s name into a belated answer to a private childhood search: the name seems to unite his mother’s aspirations with the country she had taught him to revere.

The General and the Mother’s France

The narrator’s attachment to France had been formed in childhood through his mother’s stories, told in the Lithuanian forest as if the country belonged to the world of fairy tales. Her vision came through legends, books, play, and the warmth of her affection; it made France seem beautiful and heroic before he could measure that image against political reality. He later recognized that the idealized country and the contradictory country he encountered were not the same, but by then the fairy tale had become part of him.

In his account, Charles de Gaulle and his mother are the only two people he has heard speak of France in the same tone. They were otherwise profoundly unlike, but the General’s appeal after France’s defeat carried the emotional force of his mother’s voice as well as the force of a public call to arms. The narrator’s response is therefore personal and political at once: allegiance to the appeal is also a return to the France his mother had placed in his imagination.

The Call and Its Effect

The General’s broadcast reaches the narrator against the background of his earlier confidence in France. He had interpreted the country’s silence in the face of Hitler’s threats as calm strength and self-reliance, and trusted the French Army and its leaders. His mother, he reflects, had built around him a kind of inward Maginot Line of patriotic images and certainties, one strong enough to keep anxiety and doubt at bay. That protection had left him poorly prepared to understand the danger gathering in Europe.

After the fall of France, the June 18 call gives that inherited faith a direction. The narrator says that he rallied without hesitation, moved by the General’s words and by the remembered voice of the woman who had taught him what France meant. De Gaulle’s importance in this recollection lies not in a detailed portrait of his life or character, which the narrative does not provide, but in the convergence he makes possible: a national appeal becomes inseparable from the narrator’s earliest, most intimate image of his country.