YOUTH OF FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 February 1943, Page 4

YOUTH OF FRANCE

HOPES FOR AFTER-WAR PERIOD. NEED OF UNDERSTANDING CROSSING FRONTIERS. Professor Rene Cassin, Minister of Education in the French National Committee, addressing members of the P.E.N. Club in London recently, stressed the importance of the development of education for the young after the war, both to teach youth to reason and to give youth a sense of values common to all human beings, which tyrants try first to destroy in their own countries and then in the countries they occupy. “There can be no rebuilding of the world,” said Professor Cassin, “if there is not a certain harmony in the aspirations of youth of all countries.” Youth of France will not disappoint in the after-war era. Newspaper correspondents who have lived any time in France in recent years and have had the opportunity of coming into close contact with the young people of France know this. There was among the young people a degree of impatience. They were little inclined to listen to the older people, and, quite frankly, had lost faith .in them. They were seeking new ideals, and in this loss and in this quest many were perhaps too easily attracted to follow leaders who have since shown themselves false. The young people of France will undoubtedly return more willingly and support more heartily democratic ideals embodied in the Republic. No one who has lived any length of time in France can imagine French people being able to live under any other regime, especially if it denied them the right to vote and have their say in the manner in which they were to be governed.

The Frenchman is above all an individualist, and it is only repetition to say that he perhaps pushes individual; ism to an extreme. His higher intellec-k tuality makes the passive attitude the German is willing to adopt impossible, and however the attempt to mislead him may be made, under whatever guise it may make its appearance, he will always come back to his individualist Republican point of view that the State is made for the individual, and not the individual for the State. This is a democratic principle dear also to British people, and it is a democratic principle often proclaimed by the public man of the United States. France after the war will have nothing to do with anything tainted with Fascism, and French leaders of decidedly Fascist tendencies who have come prominently into the news recently, after acrobatic, lightning turncoat changes, have another guess coming if they think the real France of French youth of today is going to tolerate them for twenty-four hours. The Codlins and Shorts will be out of the picture. France will choose for herself