"At seven o'clock [on 11 June 1940] we entered into conference. ... I urged the French Government to defend Paris. I emphasised the enormous absorbing power of the house-to-house defence of a great city upon an invading army. I recalled to Marshal Pétain the nights we had spent together in his train at Beauvais after the British Fifth Army disaster in 1918, and how he, as I put it, not mentioning Marshal Foch, had restored the situation. I also reminded him how Clemenceau had said: "I will fight in front of Paris, in Paris, and behind Paris." The Marshal replied very quietly and with dignity that in those days he had a mass of manoeuvre of upwards of sixty divisions; now there was none. He mentioned that there were then sixty British divisions in the line. Making Paris into a ruin would not affect the final event."
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Prime Ministers of FrancePoliticians from FranceAmbassadors of FranceHeads of state from FranceMarshals of France
Original Language: English
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Sources
Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume Two: Their Finest Hour [1949] (1951), p. 136
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philippe_P%C3%A9tain
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Philippe Pétain
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