German occupation of France

The German occupation of France shapes the narrator’s life from a distance as well as through military service: it tests a patriotic identity first imagined by his mother, directs his efforts toward the French Resistance and the Allied war, and intensifies the promise to return to her. The memoir presents occupation not as a continuous account of events inside France, but through the expectations, exclusions, and separations it imposes on a son fighting abroad and a mother waiting at home.

France Before and Under Occupation

The narrator’s attachment to France begins in childhood, before he can judge the country by experience. In a Lithuanian forest, his mother describes France through legends, literature, and patriotic images, making it seem as marvelous and morally certain as a fairy tale. He later recognizes the distance between that imagined country and its contradictory reality, but says the story had taken hold too deeply to be discarded. The occupation therefore confronts not only a political allegiance but an inheritance: France is bound to his mother’s love and to the country she taught him to believe in.

His mother’s vision of France finds an unexpected counterpart in Charles de Gaulle. After France’s defeat, the narrator hears Charles de Gaulle’s appeal of June 18, 1940, and rallies to it without hesitation. The call reaches him as both a summons from a national leader and an echo of the convictions of the woman who had sold hats at 16 Grand Pohulanka. The passage links resistance to the personal language through which patriotism had first been made meaningful to him.

Before the defeat, however, the narrator had not understood the scale of the danger. He says he paid little attention to events in Europe and believed in the French Army and its leaders. His mother had surrounded him with such confidence that, as he puts it, it functioned like a private Maginot Line. He had learned of France’s defeat in 1870 only at the Nice lycée, because his mother had never told him about it. In retrospect, his certainty appears less like informed judgment than a protection from doubt that could not withstand the German victory and occupation.

Exile, Service, and the Test of Belonging

The occupation makes military service the most urgent way for the narrator to answer France’s defeat, but his own claim to belong is challenged by French institutions. At Avord, he is told that he was rejected because he was born in Russia and had been naturalized for only three years. The rule described to him required French parentage or more than ten years since naturalization for a flying officer, although it had been criticized as discriminatory and was said not to be applied. His insistence that he is French meets a contemptuous response from the man explaining the decision.

The rejection changes his understanding of French identity. He comes to feel truly French not because France proves itself flawless, but because he recognizes that French people, like others, can be foolish and unjust. France, in this revised view, consists of many different kinds of faces, and he must choose which of them reflects the country his mother taught him to love. Patriotism becomes a matter of judgment and allegiance rather than unquestioning faith in a flag. That change gives his wartime attachment greater complexity: belonging is neither simply bestowed by birth nor secured by idealization.

His wartime progress is also interrupted by grave illness. Earlier, when doctors considered an operation on his kidney, his mother forbade it, despite the specialist’s advice; he survived without the operation. Later, while serving with the Allied forces, he contracted typhoid in Damascus and was given little chance of recovery. After a prolonged illness he did recover, though with lasting health consequences. The memoir makes clear how uncertain his return to service was, and how strongly his desire to continue fighting was tied to his sense of responsibility to his mother and to France.

Occupation and the Measure of Achievement

In August 1943, the narrator’s squadron is transferred to England. At Hartford Bridge, he writes A European Education at night in a cold hut shared with fellow officers, then flies missions against defended targets. Writing and flying are not separate pursuits in his account: both belong to the same effort to discover meaning in a world shaped by war. As the Allied landing in Europe seems near, he cannot bear the thought of returning home empty-handed, and imagines his mother’s pride if his name appears on a book cover.

The novel’s publication in England brings press attention and photographs, but it does not meet his mother’s expectation while France remains occupied. He sends her news of the book; her letters make no mention of what he regards as their first victory. He reads her silence as a reproach: she wants fighting deeds, not literature. The contrast is pointed. His book begins to realize her artistic ambitions, yet in the emergency of occupation she measures achievement by service in combat. Even his own modest record as a bomber pilot troubles him; he worries that his work lacks the spectacle and brilliance she might have hoped for.

The memoir does not treat this conflict as a simple choice between art and action. The narrator continues to fly while writing, and gathers photographs for his mother in the hope that she will be pleased. When he later receives the Cross of the Liberation from Charles de Gaulle, he sends word to her, joining literary recognition and military honor in the record of what he has done. The occupation has made both forms of achievement answer to the same private audience: the mother who had imagined him as an artist, a French hero, and an ambassador.

Return as Liberation Approaches

As France nears liberation, the narrator’s attention turns urgently toward home. Letters from his mother carry an unusual tenderness and apology. She tells him they have been separated for years and asks him to forgive her when he understands what she has done, but he cannot yet identify the cause of her remorse. His uncertainty makes the separation feel newly precarious: he fears that something may happen to her before he can return.

With Paris close to liberation, he arranges to parachute into southern France for liaison duties with the French Resistance. At the same time, the French Foreign Office writes to suggest that he apply for a permanent diplomatic post as a First Secretary. The offer is framed as recognition of exceptional services to the cause of liberation, though its personal tone puzzles him: he knows no one in the Foreign Office and had never told anyone about his mother’s diplomatic ambitions for him. He eventually realizes that she has been quietly promoting his prospects and pulling strings behind the scenes.

The offer does not erase the occupation’s costs or resolve the distance between mother and son. Instead, it gives their old private story an uncanny public shape: as France approaches liberation, the diplomatic future his mother had long predicted becomes possible, while the narrator is still hurrying toward her. The occupation thus gathers the memoir’s national and intimate threads together. Resistance means fighting for France, but it also means trying to reach the woman whose faith first taught him what France could be.