French Air Force Academy

The French Air Force Academy at Salon-de-Provence occupies a pivotal place in Romain Gary’s account of becoming a French airman: it trained cadets, employed him as a gunnery instructor, and subjected aspiring officers to an assessment system that could override academic success. His experience there also exposed the gap between his sense of belonging to France and the institution’s treatment of a naturalized, Russian-born candidate.

Setting and wartime role

When war was declared, Gary was serving as a gunnery instructor at the French Air Force Academy in Salon-de-Provence. The academy thus appears not only as a school but as a military workplace at the threshold of the conflict. Its cadets and aircraft would later figure in the unraveling of French military order: amid the confusion at Bordeaux-Mérignac, Gary saw his former pupils take fighter planes without orders, with no ammunition, hoping to crash-dive into bombers they believed were approaching.

The academy’s connection to the wider wartime crisis was also political. During the collapse of the front, cadets were among those told that Marshal Pétain intended to continue the fight and that a Communist fifth column threatened Bordeaux. Gary carried out low-altitude patrols over the city under that account, ready to attack a suspected crowd. He later described the briefing as a deception that left its young participants defending a cause they did not understand.

Training and assessment

At the academy, academic performance was not the sole measure of an officer candidate. Instructors assigned what cadets called the good-looks mark, officially the general aptitude mark: an all-round judgment of personality and fitness to become an officer. A cadet could rank first in studies and still fail if this assessment went against him. In Gary’s recollection, the mark gave politically reactionary officers a way to exclude Jews, left-wingers, and naturalized outsiders while appearing to follow ordinary procedure.

The assessment’s force lay partly in its discretion. Gary learned that he had been kept waiting at Salon for six weeks while officials debated whether to admit him to the Air Force or send him to the infantry. The Air Ministry had reportedly agreed to take him, but the local decision-makers rejected him through a poor mark. The process could therefore disguise a political or national-origin barrier as an individual judgment of aptitude.

Nationality and exclusion

Gary was told that his Russian birth and recent naturalization counted against him. The explanation he received cited a rule barring flight-officer commissions unless a candidate’s parents were French or the candidate had been naturalized for more than ten years. Though the rule had been criticized as undemocratic and discriminatory and was said not to be applied, the academy’s decision made nationality consequential in practice.

The episode wounded him, but it also changed his understanding of what being French meant. He came to see that the French were not a separate or superior people: they could be unjust and ridiculous, like anyone else. France, in his revised view, contained many kinds of people, and allegiance required choosing among its faces rather than trusting a flag without question. The injury of exclusion paradoxically made his assimilation feel more real, because it placed him inside the same flawed human community.

Narrative significance

The academy joins Gary’s military formation to the book’s larger account of identity as something both passionately imagined and institutionally contested. His mother’s stories had made France a cherished ideal; the academy confronted that ideal with rules, judgments, and political maneuvering. The institution’s procedures did not simply test whether he could serve. They revealed how official standards could mark a naturalized outsider as insufficiently French even as he prepared to fight for the country.

The academy also frames a reversal in Gary’s relationship with military authority. At Bordeaux, he initially trusted the officers and the patriotic explanation given to the cadets. His later account exposes the cost of that trust without treating his own readiness to obey as a separate triumph. The school’s importance therefore extends beyond training: it is where professional evaluation, national belonging, and wartime obedience meet, and where Gary begins to distinguish loyalty to France from unquestioning faith in those who claim to represent it.