De Gaulle Broadcasts His June 18 Call to Continue Fighting

Charles de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, broadcast from London called on French people to continue the fight after France’s defeat. For Romain Gary (narrator), its force came from more than the General’s authority: it echoed the voice of his mother, whose stories had made France a childhood ideal and whose own call to resist had already sounded in public.

Background: France as a Childhood Ideal

Before the appeal, the narrator’s sense of France had been shaped by his mother’s adoration of the country. In the depths of the Lithuanian forest, she had presented France through stories, historical figures, literature, and patriotic images. Her teaching made French seem like his mother tongue and France like a fairy-tale homeland; in his later account, even a long residence in the country could not wholly dislodge that vision.

That ideal did not arise from a settled understanding of France’s history or politics. The narrator recalls that his mother had omitted the defeat of 1870, which he learned about only later at the lycée in Nice. Her protective account of the country functioned like a Maginot Line of certainties: when Hitler threatened Europe, he trusted the French Army and its leaders, and France’s silence seemed to him evidence of calm strength rather than cause for alarm.

The Broadcast and the Earlier Call

After France’s defeat, Charles de Gaulle made his appeal from London on June 18, 1940, urging French people to continue the struggle. The narrator remembers hearing the broadcast as a moment of immediate allegiance. In the same passage, he places the General’s voice beside that of his mother, the woman who had sold hats at Number 16, Grand Pohulanka: it was to both voices that he rallied without hesitation.

The memoir also sets the broadcast beside an earlier, more local act of resistance. The narrator insists that his mother’s call came on June 15 or 16, at Mr. Pantaleoni’s vegetable stand in Buffa Market, Nice. Standing on a chair among carrots, beetroots, and lettuces, she brandished her cane and urged those present to reject the armistice and continue the war from England and North Africa. She invoked her son as a famous writer and diplomat already dealing the enemy mortal blows, and showed the crowd a page containing one of his stories. The appeal at the market was not de Gaulle’s broadcast, but the narrator deliberately recalls it beside the broadcast as an earlier expression of the same refusal to accept defeat.

Consequences for the Narrator

The paired calls reveal how personal attachment and political allegiance converge in the narrator’s response. His rallying to de Gaulle was also a response to the maternal voice that had taught him what France meant. The broadcast therefore joins a public appeal to continue fighting with the private inheritance of his mother’s patriotic imagination.

That inheritance had also left him poorly prepared to understand the danger that preceded the appeal. He admits that he had paid little attention to events in Europe and found it difficult to hate anyone for long. His mother’s faith in France and its military leaders had insulated him from doubt; the defeat and de Gaulle’s call brought the conflict into view, but did not erase the ideal through which he understood it.

Significance in the Memoir

The event is remembered not simply as a military or political appeal, but as a meeting of two voices that the narrator had learned to hear in the same register. The contrast between the broadcast from London and his mother’s improvised speech among market vegetables gives the memory its particular shape: one is a nationally consequential call, the other a family-rooted act of defiance, yet each summons him to continue the fight.

The narrator’s recollection also complicates his attachment to France. His allegiance begins in a childhood vision created by his mother, while his later account recognizes that France’s history and reality were more contradictory than that vision allowed. In this episode, however, the ideal proves politically active: when defeat threatens to make surrender seem final, the mother’s voice and de Gaulle’s appeal together give the narrator a reason to rally.