Solemn homage of the nation to Simone Veil

MIL OSI Translation. Government of the Republic of France statements from English to French – Published July 01, 2018

On July 5, when I announced, at the end of the tribute to the Court of Invalides, that Simone VEIL would rest in the Pantheon beside her husband, this decision was not only mine.

It was not that of his family, however, who consented.

This decision was that of all the French.

It is intensively, tacitly, what all French people wanted.

Because France loves Simone VEIL.

She loves him in his struggles, always fair, always necessary, always animated by the concern of the most fragile ones where she engaged with an uncommon strength of character.

France loves her even more because she understood from where she came the strength put at the service of a more dignified humanity.

It is only belatedly, when Simone VEIL spent 50 years that France discovered that the roots of her engagement plunged into the absolute darkness, unspeakable death camps. It was there that she found in her to survive that deep, secret, inalienable part which is called dignity. It was there that, despite the misfortunes and the mourning, she conceived the certainty that in the end, humanity will prevail over barbarism.

All his life was the illustration of this invincible hope. We wanted Simone VEIL to enter the Pantheon without waiting for generations to pass, as we had become accustomed to, so that his struggles, his dignity, his hope remain a compass in the troubled times we are going through.

Because she knew the worst of the twentieth century and yet struggled to make it better, Simone VEIL will rest with her husband in the 6th vault.

She will join four great characters of our history: René CASSIN, Jean MOULIN, Jean MONNET and André MALRAUX. They were like her masters of hope. Like them Simone VEIL fought against prejudices, isolation, against the demons of resignation or indifference without yielding anything, because she knew what France was.

Like them, she braved hostility, acted as a forerunner, embraced causes thought to be lost to remain faithful to the idea she had of the Republic and the hope it placed in it.

It is beautiful today that this woman joins in this place the brotherhood of honor to which, by the spirit, by the values, it belongs by right and of which she had all her life the fights in sharing.

Like René CASSIN, Simone VEIL fought for justice.

In 1948, CASSIN had the United Nations General Assembly ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Simone VEIL knew, however, that in this noble struggle for human rights, half of humanity was stubbornly being forgotten: women.

She had seen their subjugation and their humiliations, she herself had faced inequalities that she considered absurd, outdated. So she builds herself to be fair to women, to all women.

Justice for women detained in unworthy conditions, which she tried when she was a magistrate to improve, justice for women, their financial independence, their marital autonomy, their equality in parental authority.

Justice so that their qualities and talents are recognized and used in all fields.

For the women who were bruised in their flesh, in their souls, by the angel-makers, for the women who had to conceal their distress or shame, and which she wrenched from their suffering by wearing with admirable force the draft law on voluntary termination of pregnancy, at the request of President Valéry GISCARD D'ESTAING and with the support of Prime Minister Jacques CHIRAC.

Justice for women uncertain about their rights and their place in society, for women relegated by laws, clichés, conventions. Justice for all those women who, everywhere in the world, are martyred, abused, sold, mutilated.

With Simone VEIL come here these generations of women who made France, without the nation offering them the recognition and freedom that was due to them. May it be justice for all of them today.

And that on this day, our thoughts go especially to one of them, to a resolute, strong, gentle woman who, in the unspeakable conditions of the death camps, supported her two daughters with all the strength of her love . She would have desired a life of carelessness for her, but for many months her tragic destiny wanted the spectacle of their suffering to add to her, until her final exhaustion, until her death.

I greet here the memory of Simone VEIL's beloved mother, Yvonne Yvonne, born STEINMETZ, who died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, whose example inspired Simone VEIL's fight for women.

Like Jean MONNET, Simone VEIL fought for peace and, therefore, for Europe.

She who had lived the unspeakable experience of savagery and arbitrariness knew that only dialogue and harmony between peoples would prevent Auschwitz from reborn on the cold ashes of its victims.

She became a warrior of peace, she became a fighter of Europe. She wanted Europe by realism, not by idealism; by experience, not by ideology; by lucidity, not by naivety.

She was not fond of the irenic faders and the technocratic complications that sometimes became the face of this Europe, because she was of this generation for which our Europe was neither an inheritance nor a constraint, but a conquest of every day.

As parliamentarian, as President of the European Parliament, as a committed citizen, she never ceased to revive the original flame and to embody the founding spirit.

Jean MONNET said that Europe would be the sum of the solutions to these crises. We owe it to Simone VEIL not to let the doubts and crises that hit Europe mitigate the brilliant victory that for 70 years we have won over the rifts and wanderings of past centuries.

Nothing would be worse than giving up the hope that gave birth to Europe from the ruins where it had been buried and where it could have perished.

Today we are the repositories of this challenge to the old nations, which she never ceased to enliven. This challenge is ours, that of the youth of France and Europe, while the bad winds rise again. It is our most beautiful horizon.

Like André MALRAUX, Simone VEIL fought for civilization.

Born before the war, in a civilization that believed itself still immortal, it saw its rapid and cruel collapse. She saw the moral bearings of humanity disappear. She saw SS martyrs the day children in the camps, before finding theirs at night around the family table.

She knew in her flesh that Auschwitz had permanently upset the very idea of ​​civilization. She shared with MALRAUX the sad conclusion that there was no longer any "meaning of man" and no more "meaning of the world". But she also knew that a new civilization could be rebuilt.

Eprise of art and literature, she continued to believe that the culture grows the man and the light on his destiny. She will rest a few meters from her dear Jean RACINE, whom her father André JACOB had so well known how to make her love, who is buried in the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, whose chair she occupied at the French Academy.

Working for education, the rehabilitation of prisoners or as minister, for the protection of the most fragile, she knew that civilizations weave these organic links, these thousand invisible sons.

Engaged in the friendship between the European peoples, it was also in the dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, because humanity does not stop at our borders.

She believed in this common destiny called nation, and in this exhilarating adventure called civilization, she knew that every day that passes is a new fight against barbarism.

Like Jean MOULIN, Simone VEIL fought for France to remain true to itself.

Betrayed by a French state that made a deal with the Nazi occupier, she could have turned back to her country the pain of her ordeal and her bereavements, she did nothing.

And when she decided to testify of her deportation, it was first to pay homage to the Righteous of France. She rose against those who portrayed a France won by the anti-Semitic delusions of HITLER, PETAIN and LAVAL, to recall the incredible and spontaneous courage of these French families who, at the risk of their lives, had hidden children Jews, saving them from persecution and an atrocious death.

She recalled the time when the French were providing their fellow Jews with forged papers and work certificates. It was the time when the archbishop of Toulouse, Monseigneur Saliege, called for asylum in the churches, it was the time when pastors secretly celebrated Purim in their temple. It was the time when underground solidarities maintained French fraternity.

To the left of the vault number 6, on the wall of the crypt are inscribed the names of the Righteous.

At that time, France also remained France because men and women abandoned everything to swell the ranks of the army of shadows. Then General DE GAULLE charged Jean MOULIN to organize the resistance.

It was for that France, for the real France, against France disfigured whose exiled collaborators continued to defend the crimes that Simone VEIL one day decided to testify.

France, thanks to her and some others, looked in the face what she did not want to see, what she did not want to hear, what she had so wanted to forget and which, nevertheless, was a part of herself. She understood that the nation must not fear the hurt memory of its bruised sons and daughters, but welcome and embrace it.

Simone VEIL never accepted being decorated for being deported, nor did she accept that a rivalry of memories emerges. The reality of the gas chambers and cremation ovens of the extermination camps, instruments of crime against humanity, does not in any way diminish the heroism of the tortured, shot and deported resistance fighters.

But there is a truth of history and the truth of Jewish martyrdom is now an integral part of French history, as is the epic of the Resistance.

Simone VEIL will sit next to Jean MOULIN, the hero of the Resistance, the victim of Klaus BARBIE who delivered no secret under the most abject torture. She, Simone VEIL who martyred by the SS never gave up her dignity.

They are for us two examples of profound humanity, heroic in his sacrifice, admirable for his courage and his testimony. She who, on the left arm, bore the stigma of her misfortune, this number of deported to Birkenau which one day a French asked him if it was his cloakroom number. This number 78651 was the Viaticum of his invulnerable and untouched dignity. It will be engraved on his sarcophagus, as he had been tattooed on his teenage skin. Because in Simone VEIL, it is finally the memory of the racial deportees, as it said itself, of the 78,500 Jews and gypsies deported from France who will enter and live in these places.

Tomorrow, she will join the four French knights who sleep in this vault. Simone VEIL will be able to enter looking at them proudly of this mineral look, always worried. She can tell them, "I did my part."

She will be welcomed as an equal in this family united by ideals and courage called "the French heroes".

She calls us to do our part too.

Another knight will have joined them, a knight serving, because it was not thinkable to disunite what life had so strongly welded, in joy but also in these terrible deaths that were the loss of the sister of Simone VEIL, Madeleine said Snowy, survivor of the camps like her, disappeared in a car accident; and the death of his son Claude-Nicolas, who was struck down in 2002 by a heart attack.

It was not thinkable that Simone should rest without Antoine. This company would have missed him.

Antoine, the talented senior civil servant who brought the young survivor the elegance and humor that allowed him to live again. Antoine, who dreamed of politics and had left the ENA, had begun to meddle in a European liberal fashion. Antoine, who had the intelligence to understand that his wife, brought to politics not the simple desire to change things, but the bitter desire to fight for the most part.

He then put his talent, his love at the service of the battles led by Simone, that he supported even in the difficult hours when his opponents handled the filthy insult and the physical threat.

Their dialogue never ceased, punctuated by laughter and sometimes melancholy, cheered up by a family of three sons: Jean, Claude-Nicolas and Pierre-François and soon twelve grandchildren. This dialogue was interrupted only by the death of Antoine in 2013, he who seemed made to live always, never had the taste of life left him.

The Pantheon will now rustle from the murmur of their conversations.

Your work Madame was great, because she fed on your mourning and your wounds, your fidelities and your intransigences, but also because you have fully dedicated to France and the Republic.

All that you did, you did it also because the Republic called you there, you took it, you encouraged it. You believed in the Republic and the Republic believed in you. The size of one has made the greatness of the other. It is because with all your might you have honored her that today she honors you.

Your work however is not completed. She enters here in history and in posterity. May your battles continue to flow in our veins, inspire our youth and unite the people of France. May we continually show ourselves worthy as citizens, as people of the risks you have taken and the paths you have traced, for it is in these risks and on these roads, Madame, that France is truly France.

In the evening of your life, you wished that a kaddich be said on your grave, your wish was granted by your family on July 5, 2017, in the cemetery of Montparnasse.

Today, France offers you another song, the one of which the Ravensbrück prisoners had embroidered the first words on paper belts; and that they sang on July 14, 1944 in front of the stupefied SS. This song that the deportees, each in their language, sang when their camp was finally released, because they knew it all by heart. This song of which the world resonated when barbarism again showed us its ugly face.

This song is that of the Republic, it is that of France that we love and that you have made bigger and stronger. May it be today, Madam, the singing of our gratitude and the gratitude of the nation that you have served so much and which has loved you so much.

This song is the Marseillaise.

Long live the Republic, long live France.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a translation. Please accept our apologies should the grammar and / or sentence structure not be perfect.