Liberation of France

The Liberation of France is the culmination of Romain Gary’s wartime journey and the point at which his hope of returning to his mother meets the truth of her death. As the Allies advance through southern France, he makes his way toward Nice with news of his imminent arrival sent ahead by every available channel. The homecoming he imagines is at once personal and theatrical: a victory that will vindicate his mother’s faith in him. Its actual ending is quieter and more devastating. At the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, he learns that she died years earlier, having arranged for letters to keep reaching him until the war was over.

The Long Approach to Liberation

For the narrator, the route to liberation begins with a conviction that France could not lose. During the collapse of the front in 1940, he remained confident that France would recover, interpreting Germany’s advances as part of a trap devised by the French command. At Bordeaux, he flew low-altitude patrols under the belief that they were protecting Philippe Pétain from a Communist uprising. Only later did he recognize the deception: the supposed threat had distracted him from the political defeat already taking place. His account makes the liberation’s eventual approach the reversal of an earlier, painful misreading of events.

His attachment to France was not uncomplicated. At the French Air Force flight school, despite an assessment that his performance warranted a commission, he was passed over and made only a lance corporal. He later learned that the decision rested on his Russian birth and recent naturalization: a rule restricted flight-officer commissions to men whose parents were French or whose naturalization was more than ten years old. The rule was not consistently applied, but in his case it obstructed the military career through which he hoped to serve France. The episode gives his eventual return a particular force: the man coming home had once been treated as insufficiently French even while he understood himself as belonging to the country.

After the French defeat, he continued trying to reach England and join the fight. In Casablanca, when his resolve was weakening and the harbor seemed closed to him, he encountered a corporal who told him that the cargo ship Oakrest was due to sail with troops from North Africa. With help from the corporal and officers at the harbor, he and two fellow trainees got aboard. The escape was one stage in a longer passage from defeat toward the eventual liberation of the country to which he meant to return.

A Return Made Urgent by Separation

The prospect of returning to France carried an intensely private urgency. Earlier, when he had been gravely ill, his thoughts had turned to the possibility of leaving his mother without support and to the fear that he would fail to become the person she expected. When doctors proposed an operation on his kidney, she flatly refused it, convinced that the operation threatened the future she imagined for him. He survived, and later understood her decision as one expression of the same fierce investment in his life that would shape his wartime resolve.

Her own illness sharpened that sense of dependence. At the family’s hotel, she collapsed after a day of work; the episode revealed that she had diabetes and had been injecting insulin each morning without telling him. He feared that she might die before she could see him fulfill her expectations. The fear became more acute during the war, as illness and separation repeatedly put his survival in doubt. In Damascus, typhoid left him gravely ill; after a slow recovery that included lasting facial paralysis and heart damage, he asked when he and his comrades could return to battle. These episodes do not make his later journey home a simple triumph. They establish how closely his sense of survival and purpose had become bound to the prospect of reunion.

The Southward Journey

When Paris was on the point of liberation, the narrator arranged to be parachuted into southern France for liaison work with the Resistance. The Allied landings in the south cut short that plan. He instead obtained special orders from his commander, General Corniglion-Molinier, and travelled with American assistance in a series of jeeps as far as Toulon. The terse designation on his written instructions, identifying the mission as urgent, opened the way through the successive stages of the journey.

He had sent word of his approach to his mother in ten separate messages, and a coded message had also been passed to the Maquis. A liaison officer offered to contact her, while members of the Buckmaster network promised to keep watch over her during the fighting. These efforts express more than a wish to reach a particular house: the narrator’s friends understood the return as part of a shared struggle for justice and reason. To him, the Mediterranean Sea seemed to welcome him toward the shore, while the landscape of the south appeared to gather his wartime experience into a homecoming.

He travelled with visible evidence of the life he had led: medals on his uniform, captain’s stripes, and copies of his novel in French and English in his shoulder bag. He also carried press cuttings and the letter that promised entry into the French Diplomatic Service as a First Secretary. The Foreign Office had offered the appointment in recognition of his services to the Liberation, although he knew no one in its civilian departments and had never told anyone of his mother’s diplomatic ambitions for him. He eventually realized that she had been working behind the scenes, praising him to influential people and arranging the opportunity without his knowledge. The offer therefore joined public recognition to a private inheritance: even as he approached France, his mother was still shaping the future he believed he had to earn.

Homecoming and Its Reversal

The Allied advance brought him across the Var toward Nice. Before that crossing, the crowds and friendly gestures along the road had seemed to confirm that he was arriving in a world where suffering and sacrifice had meaning. As he approached the familiar streets and house, his attention narrowed to the figure he expected to be waiting for him. The passage from exhilaration to apprehension marks the last movement of the homecoming he had imagined.

At the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, no one was there to greet him. The people he questioned vaguely remembered a Russian woman who had once run the place, but had not known her. He learned that his mother had died three years and six months earlier, a few weeks after his departure for England. The news overturned the expectation that liberation would reunite them, while revealing that she had understood how dependent he still was on her support.

In the final days of her life, she had written nearly 250 letters and sent them to a friend in Switzerland, with instructions that they be forwarded at intervals. Their undated sequence concealed her death from him and continued to give him encouragement as he fought through the war. What had seemed to him like his mother’s distant, ongoing presence was the effect of this deliberate plan. The liberation thus brings two truths together: he has survived and returned, but the person to whom he most wanted to return is gone; and her care has continued to reach him through the very moment of victory.

Meaning in the Memoir

The Liberation of France is presented both as a public historical change and as the ending of a private promise. The narrator’s military service, his contested belonging, and his efforts to reach the country are gathered into the journey south; yet the defining revelation occurs not on the battlefield but at the family hotel. His return cannot undo the separation that the war prolonged.

The letters transform that separation without erasing it. His mother’s plan allowed her to keep supporting him after her death, so the victory he reaches is inseparable from an act of care performed in advance. The memoir’s ending therefore grants the homecoming its promised force while refusing the reunion he had pictured: he reaches the liberated shore, but discovers that his mother’s support has already carried him there.