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Mitterrand, Let us stress the importance of multilingualism

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 7

. . . I thank you for the patience and attention with which you have been kind enough to listen to me, and I should like to finish with a few remarks of a more personal nature. Fate would have it that I was born during the First World War and fought in the Second. I therefore spent my childhood in the surroundings of families torn apart, all of them mourning loved ones and feeling great bitterness, if not hatred towards the recent enemy, the traditional enemy. However, ladies and gentlemen, such enemies have changed from century to century, as traditions have always changed. I have had occasion to say to this House before that France has engaged in wars with every European country, with the exception, I believe, of Denmark. We have to wonder why . . .

(Applause)

But my generation has almost completed its work; it is carrying out its last public acts, and this will be one of my last. It is therefore vital for us to pass on our experience. Many of you will remember the teaching of your parents, will have felt the suffering of your countries, will have experienced the grief, the pain of separation, the presence of death - all as a result of the mutual enmity of the peoples of Europe. It is vital to pass on not this hatred but, on the contrary, the opportunity which we have for reconciliation, thanks - it must be said - to those who, after 19441945, themselves blood-stained and with their personal lives destroyed, had the courage to envisage a more radiant future which would be based on peace and reconciliation. That is what we have done.

(Applause)

However, I did not acquire my own convictions in this way by chance. I did not acquire them in the German prisoner-of-war camps in which I was a captive, or in a country which itself was occupied - a situation which many of you will have experienced. I remember that even families who practised the virtues of humanity, of kindness, spoke with animosity when they talked about the Germans. When I was an escaped prisoner of war - or rather, when I was in the process of escaping - I met some Germans, then I spent some time in a prison in BadenWürttemberg, and I used to talk to the people, Germans, there and I came to realise that the Germans liked the French more than the French liked the Germans.

I say this without wishing to denigrate my country, which is no more nationalistic than any other, far from it. I say this to make it clear that, at that time, everyone saw the world from his or her own viewpoint, and that those viewpoints were generally distorting. We must overcome such prejudices. What I am asking you to do is almost impossible, because it means overcoming our past. And yet, if we fail to overcome our past, let there be no mistake about what will follow: ladies and gentlemen, nationalism means war!

(Loud applause)

War is not only our past, it could also be our future! And it is us, it is you, ladies and gentlemen, the Members of the European Parliament, who will henceforth be the guardians of our peace, our security and our future!

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      Cf.  Proudhon, Principe Fédératif * Le mémorandum d'Alexis Leger * The Briand Memorandum * Kalergi, European Spirit must Precede Europe's Political Unification * La Construction de l'Europe selon Jean Monnet * Plan Fouchet * L'Union Européenne selon Altiero Spinelli * Mitterrand and Kohl urge European Political Union * Il Manifesto di Ventotene

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