Philippe Pétain gave this speech via radio to the French people declaring a new government with him having complete control.
Immense tasks face France. One has only to stop and think of the refugees and the supply problem to estimate their gravity and scope. The nation’s communications must be restored. Each man must be returned to his hearth and his job.
In these dark days, after France has been forced to the ground militarily, new trials have been inflicted upon her.
England, after a long alliance, has in a most opportunistic manner attacked our partially disarmed and immobilized warships in our ports. Nothing could justify that aggression. If England thought we would give our fleet to Germany, she was wrong.
The fleet received orders to defend itself and did so valiantly, despite the inequality of the battle.
France stands alone, attacked today by England for whom she consented to many severe sacrifices.
We have a most diflicult task to accomplish for which I need your confidence.
I have formed a new government composed of twelve Ministers who will be assisted by general secretafies taken from the principal services of the State. Governors will be in charge of the twelve large Provinces.
Power will thus find itself centralized and decentralized simultaneously. Officials will not be subjected to too much supervision. They will be free to operate and quicker to have more responsibility for their acts.
In order to regulate certain questions in a better manner, the government is preparing a seat for itself in the occupied territories. For that reason we have requested that Versailles and the ministerial quarters in Paris be vacated for us.
We must apply ourselves to create an elite corps without any other consideration than their capacity to command.
Labor is France’s supreme resource.
International capitalism and socialism exploited and degraded France. Both participated in preliminaries of the war. We must create a new order in which we no longer admit them.
We shall renounce neither profit, which is a powerful inducement, nor savings. Gains will remain as recompense for both labor and investment.
Your work will be defended, your families will have the respect and protection of the nation.
We must recreate lost confidence. The French family will remain the depositary for France’s long and honorable history.
We know that youth must live and draw its strength from the open air which will prepare it for life’s battles. We must see to that.
Let us give ourselves to France; she always has led her people to greatness.
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.
