The War of the Races

Henri Berenger, author of the following article, was for some time French Ambassador to the United States, having been appointed to that post on December 8, 1925. He has represented his country in many lands and has often been a delegate to the league of Nations. Since January, 1912, he has been a member of the French Senate, representing the island of Guadeloupe.

Well-known as an author Mr. Berenger received the title of Laureate of. the French Academy in 1894 and 1915. He is an officer of the Legion of Honor, and serves on a number of Senatorial commissions. He is at the present time president of the Senatorial Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Senator, ambassador, author, M. Uerenger is considered one of the major French statesmen of today.

Is there a special distinction between “Aryan” and Semite, I wondered. Can “Aryans,” then, be the tall, slim, fair-haired, blue-eyed, men and women ? And are the Jewa, on the contrary, the short, dark, black-eyed, swarthy people ? Must one thus dis-tinguish be -Henri Berenger tween “Aryan” and “non-Aryan?”

I do not wish to discourse at length on this subject. However, I would like to offer you some personal evidence.

A few days ago while crossing the Champ-de-Mars, someone called me and said, “Don’t you recognize me?” It was a well-known professor of religious hisvery at the Sorbonne, with whom I had been very friendly. We began to talk about the racial question.

“This is what happened to me the other day,” he said. “I was leaving Paris for a convention at Marseilles. I had taken the evening train, and in my compartment there was a very beautiful woman, with fair hair, blue eyes, a fine figure. ‘ She was a veritable Venus,

During the trip we began to chat.

“You are going to the Riviera ?” I asked her.

“No.”

“You are going to Marseilles?”

“No. I am going much farther. I am going to Haifa.”

CLASSED AS JEWISH

And she told him that she” had been classed as a Jew, by a decree of the Hitlerite government, and that she was therefore obliged to leave Germany in order to find a fatherland and a profession else where, all’ because she was a {SPAN}##{/SPAN}.

“Now,” my friend said to me, “I have never seen a more beautiful example of the Valkyries of the north.”

And this is what happened to me. I spoke to you about my stay in Geneva, when I met Dr. Goeb-bels. I found him very slender and short, with dark hair and Oriental eyes … and I wondered whether I weren’t dealing with a member of the race cursed by the Germans. But, Dr. Gbebbels having informed me that a Jew is not an “Aryan,” I came to the conclusion that one could be “Aryan” and still look like a Semite.

These are two examples that show better than any long disser-tations, I think, that one can be Semtic and seem to have escaped ## some Nordic fairy-tale, or can be “Aryan” and seem to have escaped from the “Thousand and One Nights.”

Races? Yes, there is a race. It is called the human race. I go ##. Let us admit that, five, ## or eight or ten thousand years before history began, there had been pure races. But innumerable cross-mixtures and entanglements came as a result of the migrations and the passing of centuries. The blood of ail races became fused and mixed by wars as well as by travels. Whole peoples by the tyrants of antiquity were transported from one continent to another in order to build their colossal edinces. But they all were prolific and no one today can boast of knowing what blood flowed in the veins of his ancestors of six or eight generations ago.

ONE RACE:-THE HUMAN RACE

Let us be a little more modest; let us not erect a fatherland on racial conceptions. As ‘ said before, for me there is but one race -the human race. The race of men equal in their origin and differing only in talent, in merit and in virtue.

I do not think I can leave you without reading to you from one of our great French writers who was anti-Semitic for thirty years but who understood during the cruelest hours of the war that he had to enlarge his conception of France. He wrote the beautiful book which many of you must have read, called “The Diverse Spiritual Families of France.” Maurice Barres wrote the book during the war while blood deluged the trenches and when there was no more a question of intellectual polemics but of defending a common patrimony of land and ideas. In his book he devoted, and this is to his honor after his detestable pages on the Dreyfus affair and on Colonel Picquart-he devoted a chapter to the Jewish soldiers and officers killed in action. Tin’s is what Barres wrote:

“In the village ## Taintrux, near Saint-Die, in the Vosges, on the 29th of August, 1914, a Saturday, the sabbath of the Jews the ambulance of the 14th corps took fire under the bombardment of the Germans. The stretcher-bearers carried away the five hundred wounded men, amid the flames and the bursting of shells. One of them, mortally wounded, demanded a crucifix. He spoke to Abraham Bloch, grand rabbi of Lyons. chaplain for the Jewish soldiers, whom he took, for a Catholic chaplain. Mr. .Bloch made haste; he sought and at last found the symbol of the Catholic faith, and he brought it to the dying man. And, several steps farther on, a shell hit him, too The rabbi died in the arms of the Catholic chaplain, Father Jamin, a Jesuit, from whom this story comes.”

UNIVERSITY OF FRANCE

Gentlemen, that is France. And it is that alone which eventually permitted her to survive the invasion of a brutal aggressor, that genius for warm universality which is peculiarly hers. Although at times it may appear to us a weakness in the ordinary course of events, let us not forget that in the decisive moments this is her supreme force. Some day, perhaps, the racism of Hitler will regret not having understood the essential principles of Christianity and of the modern spirit in regard to the equality of citizens before the law of their community. And, while waiting, an unwritten law has already judged that racism, a law that almost twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek poet Sophocles put into the mouth of Antigone before the tyrant Creon: “I was born to love and not to hate.”

And this time, France, faithful to her traditions of the ancient law and to the principles of her religion, declares herself, for Antigone, responding in her turn to the German tyrant:

“If you really wish peace among men, begin by becoming humane and returning to the League of Nations, where you always received indulgence and understanding. If you want to be respected, then honor your owr signature, and respect your own word. If you wish equal rights among nations, then begin by reestablishing equal rights among the citizens of your own nation.”