HOPE FOR FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 November 1942, Page 4

HOPE FOR FRANCE

WILL WIN BACK HER OWN LIBERTY DECLARATION BY M. PHILIP. GENERAL DE GAULLE'S LEAD. France will herself win back her liberty. That was the gist of the message of M. Ahdre Philip, National Commissioner for the Interior and Labour, to the British public in a 8.8. C. postscript of August 30. “If our lost liberties were going to be handed over to us on a plate by our best friends, we would not be able to use them,” said M. Andre Philip. •‘France would remain hopelessly divided between opposite groups and sects and would soon go down again in a social chaos. “Our only hope today, our only possibility to rebuild our country by creating amongst us all a spiritual unity, is to win our liberty again, through our own efforts and sacrifices, in close co-oper-ation, of course, with all the Allied nations, but by an act of our own free will

“That is what General de Gaulle saw, at the time of the defeat, when he refused to give up hope. His decision I want to emphasise the point —was not a military decision, for he did not then have an army, but a spiritual and political one. De Gaulle happened to be a general, as I am a professor, but he was, first of all, the only member of the last legitimate Government who, by deciding to go on with the fight, remained true to his country and to the Republic. The proclamation of June 18 will remain in our history as the modern expression of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; it will remain the most important political decision which, above and against the betrayal of their country by the Vichy people,' did keep the continuity of the Republican Government. “Today,” M. Philip ' continued, “de Gaulle is no more alone. Around him the Fighting French have been coming from all over the world, and they have shown at Bir Hakeim that they were true to our best military traditions. And from the heart of captive France our resistance movements have arisen, showing that we are true also to the revolutionary spirit of 1789. Free France and captive France are today united in a deep spiritual solidarity to fight for the freedom of a country which is not yet dead and has still something to say to the world.” M. Philip insisted on the fundamentals of French political thought, which have their roots in the French Revolution. “We go back today to the spirit of the French Revolution,” he said. ‘"We may still be divided upon the best form of administration, of economic organisation or social control of production, but in our movements of resistance we are all agreed that the France of tomorrow must be founded on the firm ground of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” In this connection it must be recalled that M. Philip has been playing an important part in the underground organisation of resistance in France, and this declaration is in reality the message of that resistance, which is confined to no one party or religious sect. In joining the Fighting French organisation in London and in accepting a post on the French National Committee, M. Philip has made manifest to all that the De Gaulle movement and the resistance movement in France are one.