Politicians From France

"He who has iron, has bread. People bow down before bayonets; a disarmed crowd is swept aside. But a France bristling with workers in arms means the advent of socialism. In the presence of armed proletarians, all obstacles, resistances and impossibilities will disappear."

"Students, young people, have the right to join together in order to guide their efforts towards a common goal, and they will use this right. As for their goal, it is simple: for them it is a matter of ensuring that the July revolution is not a lie; every edifice built by the Empire and the Restoration must be overthrown, and since not one single stone of this edifice is yet to fall, they will work indefatigably to demolish and destroy it. We call for the destruction of the university. We call for the destruction of the country’s most odious and harmful monopoly, of that which stifles civilization at its source and which is the cruelest insult inflicted on human intelligence."

"A revolution determines, within the social body, an instantaneous process of reorganisation akin to the tumultuous combinations of the elements of a dissolved body that then tend to recompose themselves in a new form. This process cannot begin as long as a breath of life animates the old aggregation. As a result, the ideas that would reconstitute society will never take shape so long as a cataclysm, by dealing the old, decrepit society a mortal blow, has not freed the captive elements whose spontaneous and rapid fermentation will organise the new world. All the powers of thought, all the greatest efforts of intelligence are unable to anticipate this creative phenomenon that can break out at any given moment. One can prepare the cradle, but not bring to life the long-awaited being. Right up until the moment of death and rebirth, the doctrines [that will serve as the] bases of the future society remain vague aspirations, distant and hazy glimpses. They are like a blurred and floating silhouette on the horizon, the contours of which cannot be determined or grasped by human efforts."

"Humanity ... is never stationary. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property."

"[H]e was converted by Jaurès to Socialism, became his most faithful disciple and succeeded him as leader. Along with his intellectual distinction, his idealism and his personal probity, Blum took over some of Jaurès' worst illusions. If anything, Blum was even more of a pacifist, more bent on disarmament; he placed an equal trust in German Social Democracy—with less reason, for there was the experience of the war and post-war Germany to learn from. He exemplified and encouraged by his leadership and his undoubted intellectual distinction all the illusions endemic in social democracy. There was no danger, he said, from the Fascists: he was badly beaten up in the streets of Paris to prove the worthlessness of his illusions. Hitler was miles away from power, he said, in 1930: Hitler was in complete possession of power in 1933. Blum and the Socialists had opposed the raising of Army service from one to two years, an indispensable measure of defence: he and they lived to regret the gap in French defences in 1940. And yet Blum was a noble man, as Jaurès had been before him."

"What interested me in Blum as a Jew was precisely that: the hatred he aroused. We find it hard today even to imagine the degree of overt, unapologetic prejudice and dislike that someone like Blum could inspire in those years, primarily and simply on account of his Jewish origin. On the other hand Blum himself was often deaf to the scale and implications of public anti-Semitism and its invocation against him. There was, of course, a certain ambivalence in Blum’s own identity: unashamedly and totally French, he was no less overtly and proudly Jewish. In later years he combined great sympathy for the newborn Jewish state in the Middle East with near indifference to the Zionist message itself. These ostensibly incompatible identifications and enthusiasms were perhaps not so far from my own at various times, which may explain my long-standing interest in the man."

"On a personal level, it turns out that Blum was, in an unusual sort of way, charismatic. He was so obviously honest, so manifestly meant what he said, so clearly wasn’t trying to be anything other than he was, that he was actually quite appealing and accepted on his own terms. His style—which to us would seem rather romantic and a bit elegantly over-polished for political use, especially on the left—was actually regarded as evidence that the Left had a leader of class. And of course one deeply hated by communists, on the one hand, and the French right on the other. Blum was also the only person who understood what his party, the Socialist Party, had to do to remain a political force in France. If socialists abandoned Marxism and tried to become a sort of social democratic party on the northern European model, they would simply blend into the existing Radical party, with whose social base they had much in common. On the other hand, socialists could not compete with the communists as a revolutionary, anti-system party. And so Blum walked a narrow path between pretending to lead a revolutionary party committed to the overthrow of capitalism, while functioning in practice as the nearest thing France had to a social democratic party."

"Although I am not a legalist when it comes to the conquest of power, I am one when it comes to the exercise of power. If parliamentary processes result in our being called upon to exercise power within the framework of existing institutions, we should do so legally and fairly without taking advantage of our presence in government to fraudulently transform the exercise of power into the conquest of power."

"What the Nationalists are once again trying to revive is the state of mind, or rather, the passions of 1912–13... Hitler to-day is miles away from power. He may be a little nearer it than, say, Franklin-Bouillon, but he is infinitely farther away from it than General Boulanger on the night of 27th January, 1889, or than Paul Déroulède on the day of Félix Faure's funeral."

"Only now do I understand the harm done our nation's best interests by the rebuff administered to Poincaré's policy in 1924."

"In all this rallying of the forces which stand for peaceful and tolerant solutions of world problems, M. Blum has rendered a high personal service. Indeed, it was not in the power of any other Frenchman at this particularly juncture in the life of France or of Europe to do so much for the common good."

"By 1937 France's Prime Minister Léon Blum had embraced the notion that concessions to Germany in both Eastern Europe and overseas were necessary if peace were to be preserved. But Chamberlain had little confidence in the French and did practically nothing to make joint Anglo-French action effective. The Soviet Union was viewed with revulsion by most Conservatives, Chamberlain among them, on ideological grounds. Even Churchill found it hard to contemplate having Moscow in his grand alliance, though that was clearly a logical inference to be drawn from his own analysis of the situation. Much hope was pinned on Mussolini, who in 1934 had appeared to take a firm line against an abortive Nazi putsch in Vienna; this was to exaggerate Italy's strength and to underestimate Mussolini's desire to overturn the status quo, which he revealed when he invaded Abyssinia and ignored all inducements to negotiate a settlement. The 1935 'Stresa Front' of Britain, France and Italy proved to be just that: a front. When Italy defected, Britain and France could not agree what to do first: get Mussolini out of Abyssinia or keep Hitler out of the Rhineland. They did neither. This pattern of Anglo-French mal-coordination, not helped by the divergence of domestic politics in the two countries when France briefly had a Popular Front government, was to continue until the outbreak of war."

"I say also: watch (…) to any signs that would suggest that there a disempowerment. That those who plunge into Salafism are somehow victims of a great handling as regards sects. No, there is also that part of personal will that you should never rule out."

"Salafism, which has destroyed and perverted a part of the Muslim world, is a threat for Muslims, and also a danger for France."

"There is no definition of cults in law. on the other hand, these organizations know perfectly evade justice by hiding their true nature, since you are aware that freedom of conscience in France is a fundamental freedom enshrined in all our principles and our texts."

"Nous avons changé d’époque, la France doit vivre avec le terrorisme, mais nous ne céderons pas à la menace terroriste, nous devons faire bloc, être solidaires. La France a été une nouvelle fois frappée dans sa chair"

"Science... dominates all things, it alone is of any definite utility. No man, no institution shall henceforth have an enduring authority if they do not conform themselves to its precepts."

"Berthelot was justified by accomplished facts in stating that applied science has done more for mankind in the last three-quarters of a century than all the progress in all ages that preceded it."

"The word truth can not be used outside of science without a misuse of terms."

"Berthelot was quite sure that physics and chemistry would soon solve the problem of aerial navigation, and he significantly remarked that when they do so " customhouses will fall of themselves.""

"Science is the real moral school; she teaches man the love and respect for the truth, without which all hope is chimerical."

"His scientific labours were immense, and he completely revolutionized chemistry in more departments than one. He transformed agriculture; proved that inorganic and organic bodies obey the same laws; established "la théorie des affinités"; and invented thermo-chemistry."

"The first half of the nineteenth century was devoted to analytical chemistry—this being due to the great work of Berzelius. The second half, however, was the era of Berthelot or synthetical chemistry."

"Berthelot... says that alchemy rested partly on the industrial processes of the ancient Egyptians, partly on the speculative theories of the Greek philosophers, and partly on the mystical reveries of the Gnostics and the Alexandrians."

"In 1851, at the age of twenty-four, he entered the College de France, as préparateur of the lectures on chemistry (under Balard, the discoverer of bromine)."

"He produced over a thousand memoirs, embracing every department of chemistry."

"[Berthelot] is not only a great chemist, but also a great philosopher. He possessed a universal spirit. His discovery of the synthesis of organic materials would be enough to immortalize his name. His work on explosive materials were also invaluable services..."

"Hence the rôle of savants, as individuals and as a social class, has unceasingly developed in modern states. But our duties towards other men increase in the same ratio, and let it never be forgotten; let it proclaimed in this hall, in this palace of French science."

"It not by reason of the egoistical satisfaction of our private vanity that the world-to-day pays homage to savants. No; it is because it knows that a savant really worthy of the name devotes a disinterested life to the great work of our epoch—I mean to say to the improvement, too slow, alas! for our taste, of the condition of every one, from the richest and happiest to the humble, the poor, and the suffering. That is what the public declared nine years ago in this same hall when honouring Pasteur. That is what my friend Chaplain has tried to express on the beautiful medal which the President of the Republic will presently offer me. I do not know if I have completely fulfilled noble ideal traced by the artist, but I have tried to make it object and end, the directing idea of my existence."

"Although Wohler, in 1828, produced artificially, and Kolbe synthetized in 1845, Berthelot was undoubtedly the creator or founder of organic synthesis."

"Marcellin Berthelot... observed ants as a hobby. He published in 1886 under the title Science et philophie... several essays. One... "Les cités animales et leur évolution". ...He was convinced that the same instinct of sociability was active among human races and among animal ones. He considered the hypothesis of the social contract as a chimerical one. ...Ten years later, in another collection of essays... Science et morale... [h]e considered that it is more useful to compare human societies with ant colonies than with beehives, because while in the latter laws are uniform, in the former there is a place for individual intitiatives."

"Science carries its legitimate pretensions further. To-day it claims the material, intellectual, and moral direction of society. Under its impulse modern civilisation marches with an increasingly rapid stride."

"Gentlemen, since the first half of the century that has terminated, without going further back, the world has strangely altered. The men of my generation have seen come into play, beside and above the nature known since antiquity, if not an antithesis, a counter-nature... but a superior nature, and to some extent transcendent, where the power of indıvidual is centupled by the transformation of forces until then unknown or not understood, borrowed from light, magnetism, and electricity."

"His laws are... (1) The heat disengaged in any reaction is a measure of the chemical and physical work accomplished in the reaction. (2) The total thermal value of a reaction is dependent only on the initial and final states of the changing system. (3) "The Law of Maximum Work," or "the theorem of the necessity of reactions"... This law is the fundamental principle of Berthelot's thermo-chemistry: "The quantity of heat evolved in a reaction measures the sum of the physical and chemical changes which occur in that reaction"—"ce principe fournit la mesure des affinités chimiques.""

"A new conception of human destiny results from a profound knowledge of the universe and the physical and moral constitution of man, directed by the fundamental notions of universal solidarity between all classes and all nations."

"Thus it is that the tangible utility of scientific results has made the public authorities understand that laboratory work should be encouraged and sustained, because it is economically a benefit to all and for the public health."

"In 1864 Berthelot began his great work on thermo-chemistry, and in 1879... published... Essai de Mécanique Chimique fondée sur la Thermo-chimie."

"Berthelot's agricultural station and laboratory were at , and here experiments on vegetable soils, the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen in soils by the agency of microbes, the action of electricity on the growth of plants, etc., were conducted. Berthelot states that twenty-five pounds of per annum per acre might be fixed by bacteria."

"He also formed by passing the vapour of and sulphuretted hydrogen over hot copper; and by the action of carbon monoxide on a hot solution of caustic potash, was produced, the formate yielding on distillation with ."

"[H]e was not only a great chemist, but a politician, philosopher, and author."

"He formed by the action of the electric spark on a mixture of and ."

"Science is the benefactor of humanity."

"According as the bonds uniting the peoples of the world together are multiplied and lightened by the progress of science and by unity of the doctrines and precepts that it deducts from facts, and imposes without violence and yet in a relentless manner to all convictions, these ideas have assumed a growing and more and more irresistible importance. They tend to become a purely human basis of nature, morality, and politics."

"[O]f the numerous syntheses of Berthelot, or the building up of chemical compounds, many... were [previously] only obtained [naturally] through... life, either animal or vegetable."

"During the siege of Paris, Berthelot was President of the Scientific Committee of National Defence, and was occupied in the manufacture of explosives, and in 1883 he published, in two volumes, his work, Sur la Force des Matieres Explosives... a valuable contribution to the science..."

"Berthelot believed in the possibility of wheat-growing and cattle-raising being superseded by the discovery of artificial substitutes for the necessaries of life. ...Berthelot's idea of the synthesis of substances that will take the place of wheat and meat is the most audacious flight of fancy... but it need not... be classed among the impossibilities."

"Although glycerine was discovered by Scheele in 1779, and its formula established by Pelouze in 1836, it was not until 1854 that its true composition was known... [when] Berthelot... proved that it is an alcoholic compound capable of interacting with... acids as acetic and palmitic."

"Gentlemen, formerly savants were looked upon as a little group of amateurs and leisured people, maintained at the expense of the labouring classes, and performing a work of luxury for the amusement and distraction of the favourites of fortune. This narrow and unjust view which took so little into account, our services and devotion to truth, this prejudice, ended by disappearing when the development of science showed that Nature's laws were applicable to practical industry, and their effect was to replace the old traditional receipts and empirics by profitable rules founded on observation and experience. To-day who would dare to look upon science as a sterile amusement in presence the general increase of national and private riches which resulted from it?"

"Each one of us, whatever may have been his individual initiative, ought also to attribute a considerable portion of his success to his contemporaries who are working at the same time as himself at the great common task."

"The most interesting of the services rendered by science is perhaps shown by comparing the servile and miserable condition of the popular masses in the past with their present state, already so much raised in dignity and comfort, without prejudice to the hopes which they are gradually realising."