Today President Sarkozy visited London to mark the moment 70 years ago when General de Gaulle made his defiant broadcast to the French nation from the BBC. The new French government under Marshal Petain had signed an armistice with Nazi Germany and ordered all French service personnel to lay down their arms. De Gaulles refusal was an act of mutiny as far as Petain was concerned and seen as an act of war against the new regime.
In the stirring radio appeal Gen de Gaulle declared himself leader of the “Free French”, spawning the French Resistance, which went on to play a crucial role in defeating the Germans.
He told his nation that “the flame of the French resistance must not and will not be extinguished”.
Winston Churchill also broadcast a speech from the BBC on that day, June 18th 1940..
However matters may go in France or with the French Government or with another French Government, we in this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have suffered we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye. And freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands — Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, all who have joined their causes to our own shall be restored.
What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, this was their finest hour.
My parents listened to that broadcast sitting in their home in London. They never forgot it for the rest of their lives. Suddenly, they recalled, years later, Churchill’s stirring rhetoric at a time when things seemed totally lost, gave people a new sense of confidence – a feeling that, at last, after decades of weakness, the nation and its leader were at one with each other.
