France’s Defeat and the 1940 Armistice

France’s Defeat and the 1940 Armistice overturn the narrator’s near-absolute conviction that France would always recover at the last moment. In June 1940, as the front collapsed, Romain Gary mistook political deception for patriotic resolve and military retreat for a prelude to victory. The episode turns on the distance between the country he believed in and the France whose defeat he was beginning to witness.

The Collapse of Certainty

On June 13, 1940, Gary was returning to base from a bombing mission in a Bloch-210 when he landed at Tours to refuel. German aircraft attacked the airfield, and he was slightly wounded in the leg. Even then, his first imagined response was his mother’s pride when she learned of the wound on his next leave: defeat had not yet displaced the family story in which his service would prove his worth.

The German advance itself did little at first to shake him. Gary recalled France’s defeat in 1870 but regarded the current crisis as different, and took the rapid German successes as a pattern familiar from the First World War. He imagined the French General Staff calmly watching its plan unfold while the Germans advanced into a trap. His confidence was not simply a calculation about the battlefield: he described it as inherited faith in the destiny of France, an inability to imagine that defeat could be final.

Patrols Under a False Account

At Bordeaux-Mérignac, Gary and two other crews were assigned low-altitude patrols over working-class districts. They were told that the mission was to protect Philippe Pétain, who supposedly meant to continue the fight against Germany and to resist a Communist fifth column preparing to seize power and reach an agreement with Hitler. Other cadets received the same explanation and stood armed in the streets, believing they were defending a leader determined to fight on.

Gary later judged the briefing an act of deception, while allowing that it may have originated with well-meaning colonels in the confusion of the moment rather than with orders from the highest levels. He flew with loaded machine guns and was prepared to use them against a suspect crowd at a signal from base. He did not recognize that the supposed threat in the streets was a distraction from the political defeat already taking shape. In his later account, the real fifth column was not an openly marching force but a process that weakened resolve and judgment from within.

The Armistice Reaches North Africa

Gary’s faith in France’s leaders survived each new setback. As defeats accumulated, he waited for a sudden counterstroke and successively invested his hopes in a series of military figures, from Gamelin, Georges, and Weygand to Huntziger, Blanchard, Mittelhauser, and Darlan. When one apparent savior failed, he transferred his expectation to the next. The succession reveals how persistence could sustain him while also leaving him vulnerable to reassuring national myths.

At Meknès, where the flying school had temporarily relocated, Gary and his companions learned that the armistice had been accepted by the North African authorities too. Orders grounded the aircraft after crews had deserted in attempts to reach Gibraltar. The grounding made the political decision immediate: continuing the war was no longer simply a matter of confidence or willingness to fly. His mother, furious at the acceptance of defeat, pressed him to act and summoned France’s sons to rally, unable to accept surrender as the natural end of events.

Defeat and the Persistence of Resistance

Gary placed his mother’s appeal at the Buffa Market on June 15 or 16, before Charles de Gaulle’s June 18 broadcast from London calling on the French to continue the fight. The contrast gives the armistice a double consequence in the memoir: it ends the expectation that the established French leadership will deliver victory, but it does not extinguish the demand for resistance. Gary’s account of the defeat is therefore also an account of how one allegiance gave way to another. His earlier faith had attached itself successively to presumed men of destiny; the emergence of Charles de Gaulle offered that faith a new focus without undoing the narrator’s characteristic refusal to despair.