Charles de Gaulle’s Appeal of 18 June 1940 was a call from London for the French to continue fighting after France’s defeat. In Romain Gary’s memoir, the appeal gathers political urgency and intimate memory: he rallied to Charles de Gaulle without hesitation because the General’s voice carried an echo of his mother’s fervent faith in France.

Background: France as a Childhood Inheritance

Before the appeal, Gary’s sense of France had been formed less by direct knowledge than by the stories his mother told in the Lithuanian forest. She made the country vivid through legends, literature, historical heroes and scenes of imagined combat. The Bastille and Jeanne d’Arc belonged to a child’s world in which patriotic history could feel as immediate as a fairy tale. French became, in this upbringing, something like a mother tongue even before France itself became familiar.

That idealized image gave him a powerful attachment to France, but it also sheltered him from unwelcome history. As a student in Nice, he learned for the first time that France had been defeated by Germany in 1870; his mother had omitted the fact. He recalls trusting the French Army and its revered leaders, and describes his mother’s assurances as a private Maginot Line of certainties. When the country fell, the appeal therefore reached someone whose confidence had been lovingly cultivated, but whose understanding of France’s weaknesses had been limited.

The Appeal and Gary’s Response

Charles de Gaulle made his appeal from London on 18 June 1940, calling on the French to continue the fight. Gary remembers hearing it after France’s defeat and responding at once. The rallying voice was not, for him, only that of the General: it also recalled the old woman who had sold hats at 16 Grand Pohulanka and taught her son to love France. The appeal’s political demand and his mother’s lifelong exhortations converged; he rallied to both voices together.

That convergence gives the event its personal meaning in the memoir. Gary presents his response not as the product of detached strategic judgment, but as the culmination of an attachment built through maternal storytelling. The country that had once seemed a distant, nearly mythical ideal now faced defeat, and the call to resist gave that inherited ideal an immediate political direction.

The Mother’s Earlier Call

Gary places his mother’s own rallying appeal just before Charles de Gaulle’s broadcast. He says she spoke at the Buffa Market on 15 or 16 June, several days before the London appeal, and notes that numerous witnesses could confirm the scene. Standing on a chair among the vegetables at Mr. Pantaleoni’s stall and brandishing her cane, she urged those present to reject the armistice and continue the war from England and North Africa.

Gary was not there to witness the scene. He says that about twenty people later described it to him. His mother ended her address by taking a page from a weekly magazine out of her bag and displaying one of his short stories. She presented her son as already a famous writer and diplomat, striking mortal blows against the enemy. The gesture exposes the distance between the heroic public figure she claimed for him and the young man he believed himself to be; his recollection turns that gap into grief as well as self-reproach.

During his solitary wandering in the Medina of Meknès, her imagined presence remained with him. He recalls being exhausted and longing for the care of a benevolent feminine guide, while her voice summoned him to battle in the grandiloquent language of patriotic exhortation. He describes her forceful nature as prevailing over his own hesitation. In this sequence, the broadcast and the market speech are distinct calls, but the earlier one helps explain why the later appeal struck him with such personal authority.

Meaning and Afterlife

The episode makes national allegiance both intimate and politically consequential. Gary’s identification with France was not presented as an uncomplicated inheritance: it had been built from his mother’s stories and images, then tested against defeat, institutional reality and the demand to choose whether to continue fighting. The appeal brought that imaginative France into contact with the France that had actually fallen.

Gary’s account also complicates the notion that belonging depends only on birthplace or official status. Elsewhere he recounts being told that his Russian birth and recent naturalization made him ineligible for a French Air Force flying-officer commission under a nationality rule. The appeal’s emotional summons and such formal limits belong to different contexts, but together they show the tension between feeling French and being recognized by French institutions. In his memory, the 18 June call mattered because it gave public form to an attachment first taught in private—and because, in the moment of defeat, that attachment became a reason to rally.