France! you who are to me the great and beloved mother, a sovereign mother whom I adore, I feel your heart beating beneath my hand; I press it and find it firm, full of life, generous, and tragic. You have endured and resumed your life, you have always come out of your defeats stronger, and today more than ever I proclaim: France lives!
I love you not as one loves a city or a picture, but as one loves a living being. I have for you that intimate affection which binds the child to his home, the sentiment of race and blood; I have drank you in as I have drunk my mother’s milk; you are in me, you are of me, and I can no more separate myself from you than from my own flesh.
If I speak thus I know what I say. I have passed through your provinces, I have worn the roadways of your plains and your mountains, I have seen your forests, your rivers, your sea-lines; I have listened to the talk of your farmers and of your sailors; I have worked for you and with you, and I have desired for you the only thing that can justify a life—the advance toward the truth, the practical amelioration of men’s conditions.
I have followed your history with respect and pity. I have watched your grandeur and your humiliation; I have seen you rise and be overwhelmed; I have seen the great days of struggle and the sombre nights of defeat. Always I have found in you bravery and patience; you have known how to suffer and to wait; and in your ruins there has always remained the seed of resurrection.
What is France to me? It is first of all a long series of things acquired at the cost of travail and blood: laws, liberties, usages, manners, languages of the heart which have been shaped by centuries. It is a civilization, a way of living, an art of thinking in which the individual has his rights and his duties, where the family and the nation find their roots.
France is also a territory, a vast and varied landscape where the climate, the soil, and the hands of men have wrought a multitude of localeries—provinces with their customs, their songs, their cuisines. The diversity of France is its wealth; there is no monotony in her face; she is by turns smiling and dignified, wild and tender, and in every corner there is something of that native grace, that secret charm which makes the French person so open to love and contempt alike.
But what I love above all in France is the spirit—this power of criticism, of skepticism, of independence which refuses to be dogmatic. France is a people who think; she is not content with patrimonial superstitions or with hollow authority; she insists on proof, on argument, and on liberty of conscience. This critical tendency has brought her lofty things and deplorable things, but it has above all rendered her alive and capable of progressive reconstruction.
I do not mean to blind myself to faults. France has had selfishness, ambition, violence; she has had insensibility to misery and has caused injustices. Yet, when one measures the sum of her good and her evil, one must confess that she has always marched toward light. Her artists have created beauty; her scientists have enlarged the domain of truth; her lawmakers have tried to make justice rule; and her hearts, in their better moments, have loved the weak and the poor.
I proclaim, then, that France is not dead. Let those who wish to bury her look at her towns and at her fields; let them listen to her women and to her children. The nation breathes, works, loves anew. There is a future in the eyes of those who till the earth and in the labor of the workshops. The cause of humanity will find in France a tenacious ally.
In fine, my love is not a blind passion. I demand of France sobriety and elevation. I wish her to be honest with herself, to face her faults and to abolish them. I want that she continue her work of enlightenment, that she bring to the poor the means of happiness, that she protect the family and the individual, and that she foster that sweet and strong civilization which makes life lovable.
And if ever misfortune should fall upon you again, if fierce storms should tear your flags, the true France will still remain beneath the ruins: the people who know how to endure and to work; those who preserve the modest virtues, those who love study and order, and those who keep in their souls the unshakable faith in justice.
This is my France: not the abstract name of a policy nor a party’s cry, but the flesh and blood of men and women who live, who suffer, and who love. I take her as she is, with her history and her future. I proclaim that my affection is absolute, and I will defend her against the contempt of those who have not loved her or have ceased to understand her.