THE NEW FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 October 1943, Page 4

THE NEW FRANCE

GENERAL DE GAULLE LOOKS FORWARD. GRATITUDE TO ALLIES. “The France that the French are at present remaking in their wounded hearts will not be the France of other days,” said General de Gaulle in a speech at Tunis, where he had had a warm welcome from his liberated compatriots. “We shall still be the same people,” he added, “in the same surroundings, at the head of the same empire, but this people will have passed through so many trials, accumulated so much experience of its own and of others, nursed within itself so much of hope and hate, that hardly will its chains be broken when it will be seen again, determined to sweep aside the old idols, the routine and red tape through which it nearly perished, and to organise within the empire, on broader, more just bases, the collaboration of its sovereignty with the loyalty of the millions of men that it has to guide. “History has taught us that violence and tyranny always come from the same place, that small states as well as great have a right to exist, to develop and to be free; that it would be vain to imagine for the future other than blood, tears and ruins if sound and practical measures were not taken to prevent the spirit of domination making another attempt to fall upon the world, and that Europe would be lost in advance for the cause of democracy if the crimes committed for so long, and always by the same criminals, should once again remain unpunished “We know well what our liberation will owe to heroic Great Britain, which saved the world, as to admirable Russia, which has carried and still carries the heaviest weight of the battle, to powerful America, which not only is building up its might on every front but lending to all the irresistible help of its raw materials and its manufactures.”