Simone Veil transported at PANTHEON
Source: Courtesy Emanuel macron
“Your number, your qualities, your presence, the presence of so many of our fellow citizens who are here among us, are living testimonies of the importance of this moment.“ At the moment of paying homage to Simone VEIL, after the powerful and poignant testimony of her two sons, let us suspend for a moment the obligatory thread of official speeches and contemplate this life? For it does not cease to astonish us.“ President Macron introduced as he gives a national tribute to Mrs Simone Veil, the French Icon, who died at 89, in Invalides, July 5th. This fatal ceremony and national homage, presided over by the President of the Republic, is reserved for the great historical figures of France. Women of this kind are still rare, and Simone Veil was one of them, having regard to her own personal journey of miraculous recap of the Nazi camps, and of her great political career whose actions have marked France and France, humanity. President Emmanuel Macron has taken a noble and wise decision to bring Simone Veil and her husband to the Pantheon to rest for eternity on the sides of famous illustrious historical figures including Napoleon ... and the "Grands Hommes" “Great Men“ such as Murat, Mirabeau, Voltaire, the great revolutionaries and Victor Hugo, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Andre Malraux of famous great writers. Another illustrious woman and her husband are buried at the Pantheon also, it is Pierre and Marie Curie, double Nobel Prize of Physics. Many celebrities attended this ceremony, including three former President of the French Republic, Francois Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, Valery Giscard d´Estaing, Francis Kalifat, chairman of the Crif, and other poetic leaders, saddened condolences and the expression of their perfect solidarity. Dear Jean, dear Pierre-François, dear members of the VEIL family,
Dear Presidents,
Ladies and gentlemen, Heads of Government,
Ladies and gentlemen, in your ranks and qualities,
“We will never be able to measure the sufferings. So profound, so violent, of those that break a soul - whether it be the dark experience of the death camps where her beloved mother Yvonne, her father Andrew, her brother John died; Later the accidental death of his sister Madeleine, companion of deportation, and his nephew Luc: of the too precocious death of his son Claude-Nicolas; Lastly, the disappearance of Antony, so present in our thoughts, in our hearts, Antoine the indispensable, Antoine always bubbling with ideas and stories, so gay and so solid.
Nevertheless, neither will we ever be able to weigh the invincible ardor, the deep impulse towards what is right and good, and the untiring energy to make it triumph. Yes, this woman's life offers to our eyes abysses of which she ought not to have returned, and victories that are as brilliant as any that she could have won.
To this mystery of existence, of character, to this mystery which defies common reason and inspires us with so much respect and fascination, we give in France a name, well anchored in our national genius. This name is greatness. This greatness is that of the battles it fought one after the other, sometimes some at the same time as the others, for they were neither more nor less than the combats of the century.
Her commitment to transfer to France, under the status of political refugees, those women who were subjected to rape, hunger and beating in French prisons in Algeria, was a relentless, generous lucidity, which still amazes us today. His battle to end the sordid and murderous conditions in which abortions were taking place, but also the social hypocrisy that favored them, is part and parcel of our modern history.
Her struggle for Europe was not due to her election as a Member of the European Parliament and then as the first President of the European Parliament. He went back further, in the very intimacy of his existence. It dates back to 1945. The wounds of the deportation were not closed, but this did not prevent it from wanting to re-establish with Germany.
One of his relatives told me this: he never heard Simone VEIL pronounce on Germany and the Germans the slightest bittersweet or hurtful words. She loved Europe, she always defended it. In moments when the country could doubt, or others criticized it, it was there. Because she knew that at the heart of this European dream, there was above all this dream of peace and freedom for which she fought so hard.
It did not, however, make oblivion, and still less pardon for the executioners, the condition of this reconciliation. On the contrary. Because it held that memory is there so that the inconceivable does not happen again, and not to lessen the horror. I see here, in this court, so many companions of his fights carried out for so many years when too many were ready to say nothing. As president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, she observed this line of a total demand. To yield nothing to oblivion, to give substance to every trace, to restore faces and names and to reconcile.
Other battles - so many of them - come to mind such as the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations forum, social protection, Valery GISCARD D'ESTAING, Jacques CHIRAC, François MITTERRAND and Edouard BALLADUR, the human rights in Yugoslavia and everywhere, always its struggle for women, its commitment to racism and anti-Semitism. Times, alas, gave him many reasons to engage with force.
But there is still more. These battles, it often took them before society and morals did them, before the majority adopted them. She was often right before the common opinion, and often against her. Simone VEIL was the scout of the Republic, who climbed up alone to the assault of Bastille, which were supposed to be impregnable, and who, nevertheless, took them, and then offered them to us, to us who had not believed that it would be possible, or who By indifference sometimes allowed the scandal to thrive. President Emmanuel MACRON stated.
