Paul Reynaad: France will survive

Paul Reynaad gave this speech during the Nazi successful invasion of France.

In the distress fallen upon the fatherland one thing above all should be said. At the moment when fortune overwhelms them, I wish to cry out to the world the heroism of the French Armies, the heroism of our soldiers, the heroism of our chiefs.

I have seen arrive from the battle, men who had not slept in five days, harassed by airplanes, fatigued by long marches and heavy combats.

These men, whose nerves the enemy had thought broken, had no doubt about the final issue of the war. They had no doubt about the future of the fatherland.

The heroism of the armies of Dunkirk has been exceeded in the fighting from the sea to the Argonne. The soul of France is not broken.

Our race does not allow itself to be beaten down by invasion. How many of these invasions the soil on which we live has gone through in the course of the centuries; our race has always thrown back or dominated the invaders.

The world must know of the sufferings of France. The world must know of what they owe her. The hour has come for them to pay their debt.

The French Army has been the vanguard of the army of the democracies. It has sacrificed itself, but in losing this battle it has dealt telling blows to the common enemy. The hundreds of tanks destroyed, airplanes shot down, losses in men, the synthetic gasoline factories and planes -- all that explains the present state of morale of the German people despite their victories.

France, wounded, has the right to turn to other democracies and to say: "We have claims on you." None of these with a sense of justice can deny this.

But it is one thing to approve and another thing to act. We know what a high place ideals hold in the life of the great American people. Will they hesitate still to declare themselves against Nazi Germany?

You know that I have demanded it of President Roosevelt. I have sent him tonight a new and final appeal.

Each time that I have asked the President of the United States to increase in all forms the assistance permitted by American law, he has generously complied, and it has been approved by his people.

But today we are at a more advanced point. Today, the life of France is at stake, at least France’s essence of life. Our fight, each day more painful, has no further sense if in continuing we do not see even far away the hope of a common victory growing.

The superiority and quality of British aviation increases. It is necessary that clouds of war planes from across the Atlantic come to crush the evil force that dominates Europe.

Despite our reverses the power of the democracies remains immense. We have the right to hope that the day is coming when all that power will be placed in force. That is why we maintain hope in our hearts. That is also why we have wished France to keep a free government and have left Paris.

It was necessary to prevent Hitler from suppressing the legal government and declaring to the world that France had only a puppet government, in his pay, like those he has attempted to constitute here, there and everywhere.

In the great trials of their history our people have known days when they were troubled by defeatist counsel. It is because they never abdicated that they were great.

No matter what happens in the coming days, the French are going to suffer. May they be worthy of the past of their nation. May they become brothers. May they unite about their wounded fatherland.

The day of resurrection will come!

Edouard Daladier: Nazis want to enslave us all

Edouard Daladier gave this speech to the French people via radio.

At the end of five months of war one thing has become more and more clear. It is that Germany seeks to establish a domination over the world completely different from any known in history.

The domination at which the Nazis aim is not limited to the displacement of the balance of power and the imposition of supremacy of one nation. It seeks the systematic and total destruction of those conquered by Hitler, and it does not treat with the nations which he has subdued.  He destroys them. He takes from them their whole political and economic existence and seeks even to deprive them of their history and their culture. He wishes to consider them only as vital space and a vacant territory over which he has every right.

The human beings who constitute these nations are for him only cattle. He orders their massacre or their migration. He compels them to make room for their conquerors. He does not even take the trouble to impose any war tribute on them. He just takes all their wealth, and, to prevent any revolt, he wipes out their leaders and scientifically seeks the physical and moral degradation of those whose independence he has taken away.

Under this domination, in thousands of towns and villages in Europe there are millions of human beings now living in misery which, some months ago, they could never have imagined. Austria, Bohemia, Slovakia and Poland are only lands of despair. Their whole peoples have been deprived of the means of moral and material happiness. Subdued by treachery or brutal violence, they have no other recourse than to work for their executioners who grant them scarcely enough to assure the most miserable existence.

There is being created a world of masters and slaves made in the image of Germany herself. For, while Germany is crushing beneath her tyranny the men of every race and language she is herself being crushed beneath her own servitude and her domination mania. The German worker and peasant are the slaves of their Nazi masters while the worker and peasant of Bohemia and Poland have become in turn slaves of these slaves. Before this first realization of a mad dream the whole world might well shudder.

Nazi propaganda is entirely founded on the exploitation of the weaknesses of the human heart. It does not address itself to the strong or the heroic. It tells the rich they are going to lose their money. It tells the worker this is a rich man’s war. It tells the intellectual and the artist that all he cherished is being destroyed by war. It tells the lover of good things that soon he would have none of them. It says to the Christian believer: "How can you accept this massacre?" It tells the adventurer -- "a man like you should profit by the misfortunes of your country."

It is those who speak this way who have destroyed or confiscated all the wealth they could lay their hands on, who have reduced their workers to slavery, who have ruined all intellectual liberty, who have imposed terrible privations on millions of men and women and who have made murder their law. What do contradictions matter to them if they can lower the resistance of those who wish to bar the path of their ambition to be masters of the world?

For us there is more to do than merely win the war. We shall win it, but we must also win a victory far greater than that of arms. In this world of masters and slaves, which those madmen who rule at Berlin are seeking to forge, we must also save liberty and human dignity.