Vichy France Period

Vichy France Period is portrayed through the effects of political authority on military judgment and personal vulnerability. In Romain Gary’s recollections, its reach appears not only in overt political decisions but also in institutional assessments, misleading briefings, and the possible consequences of being labeled a deserter.

Administrative Discrimination

At the Air Force Academy, instructors assigned cadets a “general aptitude mark,” an all-round assessment of personality and fitness for an officer’s role. Academic distinction could not compensate for a poor mark. Gary describes the assessment as a means by which reactionary, politically minded officers could eliminate Jews, left-wingers, and people regarded as foreign or insufficiently French. He says this instrument was later brought to perfection by the Vichy regime, linking the regime to the extension of a discriminatory practice embedded in military evaluation.

Pétain and Political Deception

During patrols over Bordeaux, cadets were told that their task was to protect Philippe Pétain from both the Germans and an alleged Communist fifth column. Gary accepted this account and flew low-altitude patrols with his weapons ready, believing Pétain embodied military virtue and intended to continue the struggle. In retrospect, he understood the briefing as a deception: the danger, as he came to see it, was not the supposed force preparing to seize power but the defeatist turn already taking hold within France. He suspected that local colonels had initiated the ruse without orders from higher authorities, distinguishing their actions from a centrally directed policy.

Gary connects his credulity to a longer failure to recognize how political prejudice could shape military conduct. He reflects that the Dreyfus Affair had not taught him to question the army’s leadership: he had preserved his faith in its virtues even as events contradicted it. His account makes that faith part of the period’s political atmosphere, showing how reverence for military authority could leave a young officer susceptible to a false explanation of events.

The Regime’s Reach and Gary’s Exposure

Later, after an attempted escape and the attempted theft of an aircraft, Gary faced the possibility of being posted as a deserter. A comrade’s testimony supported Lieutenant Colonel Hamel’s position that the attempt could not be attributed to Gary, who had not arrived in Africa aboard one of the squadron’s aircraft. As a result, Gary was not officially listed as a deserter, his mother was not troubled by the Vichy regime, and the North African police stopped looking for him.

That reprieve did not make departure straightforward. Gary still had to act with extreme prudence, having left his money with Ma Zoubida and needing to borrow bus fare to Casablanca, where he hoped to board a ship. The episode shows Vichy authority as a concrete threat to family as well as to the individual: an administrative designation could have drawn the regime’s attention to his mother, while a comrade’s intervention helped avert that consequence.