Politicians From France

"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."

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

"Probably the most important syntheses of his are the production of acetylene from carbon and hydrogen, and methane or marsh gas, by means of the well-known Berthelot's reaction; and of dynamical chemistry, his most important discovery is "the law of maximum work.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In 1860 Berthelot's Chimie Organique fondée sur la Synthèse, was published. It was the first... based entirely on synthesis."

"Chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it is constructed from the debris of a previous scientific formation; a formation half chimerical and half positive, itself founded on the treasure slowly amassed by the practical discoveries of metallurgy, medicine, industry, and domestic economy. It has to do with alchemy, which pretended to enrich its adepts by teaching them to manufacture gold and silver, to shield them from diseases by the preparation of the , and finally to obtain for them perfect felicity by identifying them with the soul of the world and the universal spirit."

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

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

"La terre, elle, ne ment pas [The land, it does not lie]."

"The only wealth you possess is your labour... France will become again what she should never have ceased to be—an essentially agricultural nation. Like the giant of mythology, she will recover all her strength by contact with the soil."

"Le Maréchal-paysan [The Marshal-peasant]."

"Neither Germany nor Italy have doubts. Our crisis is not a material crisis. We have lost faith in our destiny...We are like mariners without a pilot."

"My country has been beaten and they are calling me back to make peace and sign an armistice...This is the work of 30 years of Marxism. They're calling me back to take charge of the nation."

"[Pétain is France's] noblest and most humane soldier."

"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."

"I had the impression of a marble statue; a Roman senator in a museum. Big, vigorous, an impressive figure, face impassive, of a pallor of a really marble hue... Pétain did not appear to me only as a soldier; his greatness does not only derive from his skill at directing a battle, but emanates from his entire personality. No one evokes better than he what the Romans called "great men.""

"I saw General Pétain first in his working room. A fair Pas-de-Calais man of medium height, with a firm and reserved aspect and a masterful regard; a soldier before all, and one with strong will and decided opinions. I was much attracted by him."

"Went round this morning to the H.Q. of the Armies of the Centre and saw Pétain. I sat in his room while he received all the morning reports, which were read out to him by his Chief of Staff, Colonel Serrigny. I was struck by the quick and businesslike methods of both, and by the acute, pungent, and penetrating remarks of the General."

"[On 16 June 1940] Paul Reynaud was quite unable to overcome the unfavourable impression which the proposal of Anglo-French Union created. The defeatist section, led by Marshal Pétain, refused even to examine it. ... Weygand had convinced Pétain without much difficulty that England was lost. High French military authorities had advised: "In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." To make a union with Great Britain was, according to Pétain, "fusion with a corpse"."

"Pétain never gave me the idea of a General whose personality or genius could lead huge armies to victory in a war where, at the right moment, a crashing attack was essential to defeat your formidable enemy. He was an able man and a good soldier. But he was essentially a Fabius Cunctator. He was careful and cautious even to the confines of timidity. His métier after the 1917 mutinies was that of a head nurse in a home for cases of shell-shock. ... Pétain did it well and successfully. There is no other French General who could have done it as well. ... Nevertheless, Foch's summing-up of him to Poincaré will be acknowledged by those who knew him as accurate and fair: “As second in command, carrying out orders, Pétain is perfect, but he shrinks from responsibility, and is not fitted for a Commander-in-Chief.” Both Poincaré and Clemenceau constantly complained of his pessimism. He was inclined to dwell on the gloomiest possibilities of a situation. Poincaré, in his Diary, said that in the German offensive Pétain was “defeatist.” He would have made an ineffective Commander-in-Chief for Allied Armies confronted with the problems of 1918."

"When Marshal Pétain offered to lay down French arms, he did not lay down arms that he still held, but ended a situation that every soldier could recognize as untenable. Only the blood-drenched dilettantism of a Mr. Churchill could fail to understand this or try to deny this in spite of better knowledge."

"Marshal, here we are! Before you, France's saviour, We swear, we your people, To serve and follow your feats."

"I am entirely with the Marshall [Pétain], I see him as the Father of the patrie, blessed with a good sense verging on genius, and as a truly providential man."

"Remember that France has always had two strings in its bow. In June 1940 it needed the Pétain "string" as much as the de Gaulle "string"."

"Pétain has always been an anti-British defeatist, and is now a dotard."

"Marshal, here we are! You regave us hope The Fatherland will be reborn, Marshal, Marshal, Here we are!"

"Some already in power allied themselves with Hitler, including his chief ally, Benito Mussolini; Marshal Pétain (1856-1951; died in prison), the French premier who surrendered much of France to the Nazis; Pierre Laval (1883-1945; executed), former French prime minister who became leader of the Vichy government he helped the Germans establish; Marshal Ion Antonescu (1882-1946; executed), the vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Russian conducator of Romania, who forced King Carol II to abdicate, supported the Germans on the Eastern Front, and oversaw the murder of 380,000 Jews and 10,000 Gypsies; Boris III, tsar of Bulgaria (1894-1943; possibly poisoned), who agreed to deport 13,000 Jews from recently reannexed territories though protected those in Bulgaria; Admiral Miklós Horthy (1868-1957), Regent of Hungary who collaborated with the Nazis through fear of communism, but eventually broke with Hitler; and generals Georgios Tsolakoglou (1886-1948), Konstantinos Logothetopoulos (1878-1961) and Ioannis Rallis (4878-1946), Nazi puppets in Greece."

"Cold, glacial even, this good-looking blond fellow, already going bald, attracted women and men alike by the intensity of the gaze of his blue eyes."

"Pétain's achievement [in resolving the 1917 mutinies] was in fact a greater, far greater miracle than the Marne. ... Immediately after the second war ended, I simply could not praise for his achievements the man who had so often, under the pretext of helping France, placed weapons in Hitler's hands to use against my country. But the years passed, and it seemed to me to be not only a great injustice to Marshal Pétain but a cruel distortion of history to allow the dust of years to settle on what is, I am convinced, a heroic achievement which in the First World War brought victory out of defeat."

"For some, Pétain was simply "le drapeau," a personification of abiding Old France: an erect old soldier of austere tastes, of Catholic peasant stock, marshal of France, member of the French Academy, returning from his modest country estate once more to rescue his country from the rabble. On the other side, Pétain seemed less threatening to republicans than many another senior officer. ... Only the irreverent young right had mocked Pétain without compunction in the 1930's. In the summer of 1940, therefore, Pétain fitted the national mood to perfection: internally, a substitute for politics and a barrier to revolution; externally, a victorious general who would make no more war. Honor plus safety. ... Poincaré's memoirs suggest that Pétain expected French defeat in February and March 1918. Paul Valéry...in 1934, recalled...his reputation for pessimism. By 1940 these qualities had hardened into "morose skepticism." ... The 1917 alarms left their mark on Pétain's lifelong concern for patriotic morale. When Pétain claimed in the 1930's that education had become his main interest, he meant morale, not knowledge. In 1940 he was convinced...that unpatriotic schoolteachers had been responsible for French defeat."

"Georges Bidault once said that a good diplomatic agreement was one with which all parties were equally dissatisfied."

"The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong."

"The rational mechanics of Galileo, Descartes and Newton was not, then, directly applied to machines and is not surprising that parallelly it was maintained a "corpus" of experimental knowledge, more or less formalized, addressed to practical constractors... It will be necessary to wait until the end of the eighteenth century to that Lazare Carnot's sciences of machines could be formally integrated to rational mechanics."

"As result a new kind of theory to be applied on a class of motions ... these geometric motions are that which acquire different parts of a system of bodies, without neither perturb themselves nor the other and consequently these motions do not depend of the action or reaction among the bodies, but only upon the conditions of their connections, and thus being determined only by geometry and not dependent of the rules of dynamics."

"Eh! je suis leur chef, il fallait bien les suivre!"

"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es."

"La découverte d'un mets nouveau fait plus pour le bonheur du genre humain que la découverte d'une étoile."

"All strategical decisions in France are made by a non-French unelected oligarchy. The French political stage is a puppet theater, which explains the growing lack of interest for politics, among the French people."

"(The European Union is) a global apartheid (ruled) by the world of Whites."

"As a rigid logician, [Colbert] cannot object to the reduction of his principles to a logical absurdity, which may be stated thus. The growth of French industry and commerce requires that a high standard of quality in the products be maintained. This standard can only be secured by Government regulation: this regulation can only be forced on an unwilling people by search for and exposure of defective goods: this search injures the trade which it is desired to promote, and disheartens the merchants and others whose zealous cooperation is of the last importance for the success of French industry and commerce. Of course the fallacy lies in the first statement, the assumption that an absolute standard of excellence exists, and that the producer is a better judge of it than the consumer."

"Que faut-il faire pour vous aider? Laissez-nous faire!"

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to procure the largest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing."

"It is simply, and solely, the abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power."

"Si cela n'est que difficile, c'est fait; si cela est impossible, nous verrons."

"The fact that he was a Lorrainer, born and brought up in sight of the German eagle waving over the ravished provinces of France, bred in him an implacable enmity for Germany and all Germans. Anti-clericalism was with him a conviction; anti-Germanism was a passion. That gave him a special hold on France that had been ravaged by the German legions in the Great War. It was a disaster to France and to Europe. Where a statesman was needed who realised that if it is to be wisely exploited victory must be utilised with clemency and restraint, Poincaré made it impossible for any French Prime Minister to exert these qualities. He would not tolerate any compromise, concession or conciliation. He was bent on keeping Germany down. He was more responsible than any other man for the refusal of France to implement the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. He stimulated and subsidised the armaments of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia which created such a ferment of uneasiness in disarmed Germany. He encouraged insurrection in the Rhineland against the authority of the Reich. He intrigued with the anti-German elements in Britain to thwart every effort in the direction of restoring goodwill in Europe and he completely baffled Briand's endeavour in that direction. He is the true creator of modern Germany with its great and growing armaments, and should this end in another conflict the catastrophe will have been engineered by Poincaré. His dead hand lies heavy on Europe to-day."

"The most powerful figure in French politics after the retirement of Clemenceau was ex-President Poincaré. He disliked the Treaty [of Versailles] intensely. For several years after the withdrawal of Clemenceau, the policy of France was dominated by this rather sinister little man. He represented the vindictive and arrogant mood of the governing classes in France immediately after her terrible sacrifices and her astounding victory. He directly and indirectly governed France for years. All the Premiers who followed after Clemenceau feared Poincaré. Millerand was his creature. Briand, who was all for the League and a policy of appeasement, was thwarted at every turn by the intrigues of Poincaré. Under his influence, which continued for years after his death, the League became not an instrument of peace and goodwill amongst all men, including Germans; it was converted into an organisation for establishing on a permanent footing the military and thereby the diplomatic supremacy of France. That policy completely discredited the League as a body whose decisions on disputes between nations might be trusted to be as impartial as those of any ordinary tribunal in any civilised country. The obligations entered into by the Allies as to disarmament were not fulfilled. British Ministers put up no fight against the betrayal of the League and the pledges as to disarmament. Hence the Nazi Revolution, which has for the time—maybe for a long time—destroyed the hopes of a new era of peaceful co-operation amongst free nations."

"He was the only man I have ever known who at any moment, on any subject within his wide range, could make a speech, logically developed, exact in phrasing, fortified with every fact and figure, which could be taken down and printed without revisions."

"Of Clemenceau he [Woodrow Wilson] spoke in kindly terms. But when the name of Poincaré was mentioned, all the bitterness of his nature burst into a sentence of concentrated hatred. "He is a cheat and a liar," he exclaimed. He repeated the phrase with fierce emphasis. Poincaré disliked and distrusted him and the detestation was mutual."