The Narrator’s Relationship with France

The narrator’s relationship with France is shaped by a tension between inherited ideal and lived experience. His mother presents France as a land of beauty, justice, and future triumph; he first embraces that vision as an unquestionable truth, then encounters discrimination and military defeat that expose its limits. Rather than simply abandon the country, he comes to understand belonging as a choice: loyalty requires judgment, resistance, and a willingness to distinguish France from those who claim to speak for it.

An Inherited Ideal

Before the narrator can test France against experience, his mother has made it the center of a private moral world. Her conviction that the country embodies beauty and justice gives him a ready-made explanation of who he is and what his future should be. On the day war is declared, she travels five hours by taxi to see him at Salon-de-Provence, where he is serving as a gunnery instructor, and wishes him a hundred victories in the sky. Her gesture joins national duty to intimate devotion: for him, France is not merely a state to serve but also the setting in which his mother expects his life to achieve its promised greatness.

That inheritance helps explain why military defeat initially seems almost unthinkable. As the German offensive advances in 1940, the narrator interprets each setback through a story of eventual French recovery. He imagines that the country’s leaders are allowing events to unfold according to a hidden plan and expects a decisive counterstroke. His faith is less an assessment of military evidence than a refusal to imagine that the France celebrated by his mother could fail. He later describes this tendency as a congenital inability to despair: when one prospective savior disappears, he transfers his hope to another, until Charles de Gaulle appears as the leader who seems to fit the inherited ideal.

Exclusion and Belonging

The narrator’s attachment is tested before the military collapse, at the French Air Force training establishment at Avord. The official general aptitude mark, which instructors used to judge a cadet’s suitability to become an officer, could outweigh academic achievement. In the narrator’s account, politically reactionary officers could use it to exclude Jews, left-wingers, and other people treated as outsiders. The procedure was especially effective because it preserved the appearance of fairness: a candidate could be rejected through an official assessment rather than an openly stated discrimination.

The narrator regards his own rejection as a blow, but also as a decisive change in his sense of identity. The experience makes him feel, unexpectedly, truly French. He has discovered that French people are not a separate class of superior beings; they can be foolish and unjust, as people elsewhere can be. That recognition does not dissolve his attachment. Instead, it changes its terms. France becomes a country of many different faces, admirable and repellent, and the narrator understands that he must choose which of those faces represents the country he wants to serve. Belonging is no longer secured by imagining France as flawless; it depends on judgment and allegiance.

The episode also gives his national identity a social and political dimension. He resolves to take sides rather than let a flag decide what deserves loyalty. The narrator’s shift is therefore not a simple passage from outsider to insider. The exclusion that marks him as vulnerable to prejudice also gives him a more critical relationship to the nation: he can claim France without endorsing every institution or official acting in its name.

Defeat, Disillusion, and Choice

That critical understanding arrives unevenly. During the collapse of the front, the narrator continues to trust the military establishment and accepts a misleading explanation for patrols over working-class districts of Bordeaux. He believes that the patrols protect Philippe Pétain, whom he still understands as a defender determined to continue the struggle. In retrospect, he recognizes that he and other cadets had been deceived while the country’s political direction was changing. His earlier certainty has made him unable to imagine that a revered national figure could put personal and political interests above France’s good name.

The narrator connects this failure of judgment to a broader habit of believing the stories a nation tells about its noble moments. His mother’s gift for sustaining a hopeful picture of France has become part of his own way of seeing: defeat repeatedly appears to him as the prelude to a brilliant reversal. The faith is both an emotional resource and a liability. It keeps despair at bay, but it also delays recognition of what is happening. He can continue to believe in France while misunderstanding the actions of those governing and commanding in its name.

When Charles de Gaulle emerges as a leader who will continue the fight, the narrator’s expectation finally finds a credible object. He decides to follow him to England with three friends, even though the aircraft they intend to use is unfamiliar to them. Later, after orders restrict aircraft movements, the narrator and a sympathetic pilot take off for Algiers without authorization. Their Potez has no supplementary fuel tanks, and the flight carries a serious risk of running out of fuel before reaching the African coast. The narrator nevertheless sees himself as protected by his mother’s love and as destined to return to her in triumph. The belief that once made him misread military events now helps him act when official instructions conflict with continued resistance.

A Free Frenchman in the Making

His mother’s ideal remains present even as his political understanding changes. During a later conversation recalled at sea, she tells him that the beauty of France is why she wants him to be a free Frenchman; when he answers that he already is one, she insists that he still has much fighting to do. Her distinction separates French identity from mere birth, sentiment, or self-description. In her understanding, becoming French requires action in defense of the country she cherishes.

The narrator’s service gives that demand a practical meaning. He does not treat every French authority as identical with France, and his decision to continue fighting under Charles de Gaulle makes loyalty depend on resistance rather than compliance. At the same time, he does not present his choice as a clean escape from doubt: he had trusted the wrong leaders and accepted a false account of events. His emerging allegiance is more discerning precisely because it has been tested by error, exclusion, and defeat.

Return and the Unfinished Promise

The relationship remains bound to his mother’s expectations after the war. Returning to Nice in the aftermath of liberation, the narrator imagines the house and the familiar figure waiting to greet him. Instead, at the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts he learns that his mother died three years and six months earlier, only weeks after he left for England. She had arranged for nearly two hundred and fifty undated letters to be sent to him at intervals, so that he would continue receiving her encouragement without knowing she was gone. Her plan had sustained him through the war and toward the victory for which she had prepared him.

That discovery gives his relationship with France a lasting private cost. The country he fought to defend is also the country he returns to without the person who taught him what it meant. The memoir’s frame makes this absence present from the beginning: at Big Sur, the forty-four-year-old narrator lies among seals and seabirds and still longs for a total tenderness that the natural world seems momentarily to offer. The closing return to that solitary shore makes national victory no simple resolution. France remains the object of a chosen loyalty, but its meaning cannot be separated from maternal love, loss, and the ideal against which the actual country is judged.