French Air Force General Aptitude Mark System

The French Air Force General Aptitude Mark System was an instructors’ all-round assessment used to judge a cadet’s personality and fitness to become an officer. Known among cadets as the “good-looks” mark, it could outweigh academic performance: the narrator recalls that even the top student at the Air Force Academy could fail if the mark went against him. Its significance in his story lies in how an apparently comprehensive judgment of character could conceal a decision about who counted as French enough to serve.

Purpose and Operation

The mark was not simply a measure of classroom achievement. Instructors used it to offer an overall assessment of a cadet, including his personality and suitability for officership. Because the assessment was broad and depended on instructors’ judgment, a cadet could excel in his studies yet still be failed. The colloquial name “good-looks” made the measure sound like a judgment of personal bearing; its official name, the general aptitude mark, gave that judgment an administrative form.

Discretion and Exclusion

The narrator’s fellow cadet explained that officers had made inquiries about him while he waited for six weeks at Salon-de-Provence. The Air Ministry had agreed to take him into the Air Force, but the officers at the training establishment opposed that decision. Rather than reject him openly, they failed him through a low general aptitude mark, making the assessment the immediate instrument of exclusion.

The narrator’s companion connected that decision to his birthplace and recent naturalization. He said that the officers regarded three years as too short a period for the narrator to be accepted as a Frenchman. He also described a rule under which a flying officer had to have French parents or have been naturalized for more than ten years, while noting that the rule was not supposed to be applied. Although Parliament had criticized it as undemocratic and discriminatory, the officers could use the general aptitude mark to produce a similar result without openly invoking the restriction.

The narrator describes the mark as a means by which reactionary, politically minded officers could eliminate Jews, left-wingers, and other naturalized outsiders. Its force came partly from the appearance of procedural propriety: as his companion observed, the decision had been made according to the rules, and the rules made it difficult to protest. The narrator further says that the system was later perfected by the Vichy regime, extending the mark’s significance beyond his own failed assessment to its potential as a mechanism of political exclusion.

Consequences and Significance

The failed assessment wounded the narrator, but it also changed his understanding of belonging. He later describes the experience as a blow that made him feel truly French, as if the injury itself had completed his assimilation. He had understood that the French were not a separate or superior kind of people: they, too, could be foolish and unjust. France, he concluded, contained many different faces, and he had to choose which of them resembled the country his mother had taught him to love.

Five years later, the narrator encountered the captains associated with the rejection. By then he had become a decorated officer, while they remained captains; he wore his medals openly, but says he felt no animosity toward them. The contrast gives the mark a personal aftermath without undoing the injury: the assessment had once denied him recognition, but it could not determine either his later service or his sense of French identity. In the account, the system exposes the gap between formal inclusion and practical acceptance, while the narrator’s response turns an imposed exclusion into a more complicated identification with France.