Seen from Quebec, from overseas, not from beyond the grave yet (like some of my uncles who crossed the ocean to participate in the landing on the beaches of Normandy in the Second World War), France would now make its own, with the Vichy founders of the National Rally (RN), Putin’s perfidious slogan “1941-1945, we can do it again”! This France for which we fought and which we liberated with the Allies, would this France be blinded to the point of renewing ties of shadow and error with these dark forces, these racist laws? Will we end up, with the new xenophobic laws of the RN, by tagging Nazi swastikas or Putin’s bloody Zs on the doors of “dual nationals”?
How can we believe, after the joy of the Liberation and reconstruction, how can we believe, after the “Thirty Glorious Years”, that a progressive and free France has not succeeded in dispelling this darkness and this ignorance, to the point that we would have to consider, in Quebec, that our young people might have to cross the ocean again with today’s Allies to get France out of the clutches of the extreme right? So, it would be a matter of “doing it again”! How is it possible that France has lost its memory to this extent?
The far right is not dead: it is extending its hand over all of Europe. Putin is advancing his tanks on Ukraine, threatening Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic countries and Poland. In Quebec, we do not understand how France could bring to power a party like the National Rally, subsidized by Putin. We do not understand this diabolical alliance, this taste that France has for voluntary self-destruction.
Seen from Quebec, such a France shames us and pains us. This is not the France that inspires us. We would like France to love itself a little more and to wake up, to shine the torch of freedom again, not the freedom to hate, but the freedom to love. In Quebec, we pray that France will rise up, fight for freedom, and spread its message of hope and peace to all winds (as on the cover of our Little Larousse at school)! In Quebec, we pray that it dispels this xenophobic ignorance, chases away this fear of the other, pushes back these forces of lies, these shadows and these errors.
In Quebec, we say to ourselves, as when our fathers and uncles crossed the Atlantic to free it from the Nazi monster, that if sweet France wants to “do it again,” let it be the real thing, the real war for the real France of freedom, the France of tolerance, the France of openness to the world, in the image of the soul that it revealed in its greatest hours of glory. In Quebec, we have always believed that this was its true mission, that this was the victory of France: to enlighten the world with its great culture and its great life-giving flame.
In Quebec, this is what we have always learned from France, this is how we have always imagined France, in its pure and lively flame, this flame that has allowed us, Quebecers, to survive in the land of America, this flame that has been our very soul and that still animates us in the depths of our hearts. Long live France… free!