FAITH IN FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 August 1942, Page 4

FAITH IN FRANCE

VALUE OF AMERICAN DECLARATIONS

AGAINST IGNOBLE VICHY TACTICS. v HOPE THAT LIVES IN HEARTS OF MASSES. (By Norton Webb, in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) One salient aspect of today’s unprecedented war is the opportunity it created for the Nazis plus the PetainLaval combine to distort in the world’s eyes the true character of France, so as to mislead, confuse and actually fabricate doubt about the country’s fate as a nation. For this reason President Roosevelt’s remarks on April 28 and Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s latest reaffirmation of faith in the French people and conviction that they will reject Laval’s all-out collaboration with the Axis are reassuringly welcome for French morale, especially at this critical turn of the war as it affects Martinique. In placing America unequivocably side by side with “the brave French people” in their anti-Axis fight, the President touched on those factors underlying the ability of the great majority of Frenchmen to endure, protest, battle, and die rather than yield to Narji tyrants or to the terrorist Laval.

The peculiarly sensitive French people have gone through tragic and heartrending events since the collapse in June, 1940. Yet today’s violent surges and uprisings all over France show their resistance to the Nazi-Pe-tain-Laval usurpers of their cherished freedom to be increasing vigorously and not decreasing as their oppressors desire. This is a gratifying and emphatically healthy sign that the moral fibre and courage developed in French character for well over a century and a half is not palpably weakening. It also shows that the Republic of France, which President Roosevelt said he hoped would “soon be restored to full dignity,” lives oil in the heart of the French masses.

What qualities enabled these masses over a stretch of 153 years to achieve increasing success over despotic governments and in the development of liberty and broadening of men’s legitimate rights?

In spite of twentieth-century social advances, France has remained largely a land of middle-class bourgeois, small farmers, industrial workers, and artisans. These constitute about 95 per cent of the population and without exception cherish almost fanatically the personal independence won in 1789. . Since the Republic and independence are synonymous to them, they are all republican-minded. They have little in common with the type of Frenchman embodied in a Petain or Laval who belong to the small remnant of anti-democratic Rightists with demoded ideas and who link their fortunes with another restricted group of French reactionaries controlling most of France’s economic wealth, all of whom now make common cause with the Nazis for a “new order.” The immense majority of French men and women are hard workers, performing their tasks with a certain severity and pursuing a rigid routine of economy and strict savings. The outside world really knows relatively little about their lives.

Through suffering and often bitter trials the French people have learned certain basic truths which cannot be dislodged from their character. These spring generally from ideas evolving from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and “principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity,” as the President put it. French character in its ensemble today is showing no evidence of having changed after two and a half years of war and stress. It is in fact, fully sustaining its 153-year-old record by proving a solid pillar of resistance against Axis despotism and wiles.