Romain Gary’s entry into the French Air Force flying school is both a beginning in military aviation and a test of belonging: the French identity celebrated by his mother’s stories proves more complicated when official rules judge his birthplace and naturalization. Inducted in 1938, he reaches Avord late, works to catch up, and finds his strongest marks in flying and leadership. The promise of an officer’s uniform and a golden stripe, however, is eventually undercut by a nationality restriction—and that rejection, paradoxically, helps him feel French in a new way.

A French ideal before military service

From childhood, Gary’s mother had made France the setting of a national fairy tale. In the Lithuanian forest, she presented its history and culture with the intimacy of a bedtime story, joining France to her smile and to the security of her arms. Gary describes having little choice but to become a Francophile: French became, in feeling, his mother tongue before France became the country in which he lived. That inherited ideal shaped the meaning of military service. His mother repeatedly predicted that he would become Ambassador of France, and his anticipated place in uniform carried, for her, the promise of a larger French destiny.

Gary’s own confidence in France was bound up with the same upbringing. He recalls that his mother had surrounded him with patriotic certainties so complete that he did not learn of the French defeat of 1870 until he was at the Nice lycée. As war approached, he trusted the French Army and its leaders rather than treating the country’s silence as a warning. Later, after the fall of France, he would rally to Charles de Gaulle’s appeal of 18 June; in retrospect, the voice calling him to continue the fight echoed not only a general but also the France his mother had taught him to love.

Induction and a public farewell

Gary was inducted at Salon-de-Provence on November 4, 1938. At the station, friends and relatives gathered to see the young men off, but his mother alone brought a tricolor flag. She waved it and shouted “Vive la France!” while the other conscripts, notably unenthusiastic about service, met her display with hostile looks and mocking remarks. One recruit protested that she was not French. The comment struck at the contradiction already present in the scene: the person most ardently performing French patriotism was also being identified as an outsider.

Gary was himself exasperated by his mother’s exuberance. He seized the insult as an excuse to strike the recruit, and a brawl spread through the train as it began to move, amid cries of “Fascist,” “traitor” and “down with the Army.” He reached the window briefly to wave goodbye, then returned to the fight. The disorder gave him an escape from the emotional force of parting: the flag still fluttered on the platform as the train pulled away. His first step toward military service is thus marked by both attachment and resistance—his mother’s conspicuous devotion, his own embarrassment, and a farewell interrupted by violence.

Delayed arrival at Avord

Gary’s military preparation and law degree should have opened the way directly to the officers’ flying school at Avord. Instead, he remained at Salon-de-Provence for nearly six weeks while officials told him they had received no instructions about his case. Repeated representations through official channels brought no result. At last, Lieutenant Barbier took an interest and supported his protests. By the time Gary was ordered to report to Avord, he was a full month late and had missed almost a third of the course.

He refused to let the lost time define his prospects. Though he struggled with compass theory, he made up the ground and earned average marks overall, with notably stronger results in flying and infantry leadership. In those settings he found himself displaying an authority of word and gesture that he recognized as his mother’s. The contrast between his weak point in theory and his unexpected command in practice makes his promise as a cadet particular rather than effortless: he has to recover from an administrative delay, and his confidence grows from the skills he demonstrates once he is finally allowed to train.

The flying school and its machines

Gary relished the flying culture of the period: open cockpits, primitive instruments, and room for individual initiative. Training meant wrestling into heavy one-piece leather suits, standing or leaning out of aircraft, and working in the mud of the airfield. In the Potez-25, which moved at about the speed of a draft horse, he remembered the smell of oil; cadets also gave hand signals from the exposed nose of a Leo-20 biplane. The machines and their methods made flying vivid to him, but their obsolescence carried a darker implication. The school, he concluded, was preparing its cadets for a war resembling 1914, shortly before the more modern aircraft and battles of the coming conflict made that mismatch consequential.

As graduation approached, cadets anticipated learning their rank and choosing their postings according to their marks. Gary’s mother had sent five hundred francs for his uniform, borrowed from their old friend M. Pantaleoni of the Buffa Market. Gary fussed over his cap’s visor, tried to grow the small mustache then considered fashionable among fliers, and imagined how the gold wings on his chest might make him look tough enough to conceal the little boy beneath them. His hopes for a posting in the south were personal as well as professional: he wanted to visit Nice and appear with his mother at the Buffa Market or on the Promenade des Anglais. The uniform was not merely equipment for a career; it was the visible form of the future she had long announced.

Qualification, rejection, and belonging

The approaching graduation did not deliver the uncomplicated recognition Gary and his mother had anticipated. He learned that he had been failed because he was Russian-born and his naturalization was considered too recent. The rule at issue barred someone from becoming a flying officer unless the person’s parents were French or the person had been naturalized for more than ten years, although, as Gary was told, it was not consistently applied and had previously been challenged as discriminatory. His reply was that he was French; the explanation he received made clear that legal eligibility and his own conviction did not coincide.

The rejection produced a reversal in his understanding of France. Until then, his mother’s ideal had encouraged him to see the country as a source of exceptional virtue. The injury of being excluded by its own institutions taught him that the French were neither a separate nor a superior kind of people: they could be unjust, foolish, and ridiculous, like anyone else. He came to see France as a multitude of different faces and understood that loving the country did not require surrendering judgment to its flag. Paradoxically, this painful encounter made him feel truly French, as though it had completed his assimilation. The flying-school episode therefore ends not with the simple arrival at the military rank his mother imagined, but with a more difficult attachment—one grounded in shared human imperfection rather than patriotic innocence.