French Army
An Officer Designate rank, it is used in the Armée de Terre (Army), the Armée de l'Air (Air Force), the Marine Nationale (Navy) and the Gendarmerie Nationale. Technically it is not a commissioned rank but it is still treated in all respects as one. Aspirants are either officers in training in military academies or voluntaries, serving as temporary officers. The aspirant must have been previously élève officier (Officer Cadet). He can afterwards be commissioned as a sous-lieutenant or enseigne de vaisseau de deuxième classe. His insignia is a single curl of gold lace, disrupted by "flashes" of wool. It was widely used during both World Wars for providing young educated people with an officer's authority.
Read more about this topic: Aspirant
Famous quotes containing the words french and/or army:
“The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.”
—Robert Morley (b. 1908)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
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