SECRETARY BLINKEN: (Via interpreter) I have the words, but it’s hard to find the words. Never could I have imagined when I arrived in France a long time ago that I would be here tonight – with you, Mr. President, with all of you in this room. I can’t find the words. Yet I’m going to say a few, in English if I may, to say right away:
(In English) Mr. President, all of my esteemed colleagues, friends, loved ones: This is the honor of a lifetime to receive this award, surrounded by people I consider my extended family, in a city that, yes, I’ve long considered a home away from home. And Mr. President, it is all the more meaningful coming from you – a man whose intellectual depth, curiosity, leadership, and resilience I deeply, deeply admire. It makes this even more special than it inherently is.
As you said, Mr. President, I moved to Paris when I was just nine years old, with my mother, Judith, here with us tonight, and my stepfather, Samuel Pisar. My sister Leah, who is also here, came into the world soon after that, to my great and everlasting joy, and I also join my stepsisters Helaina and Alexandra.
And when I arrived in Paris – (via interpreter) without a word of French, but thanks to the Ecole Bilingue, a remarkable school, one – all my professors, my classmates, and our great friends the Servan-Schreiber, I learned. I learned by listening to Sardou, Clerc, Hardy, Gainsbourg, Cabrel, Higelin – and dare I say it, Claude Francois and Dalida. Let’s face it, these were the ’70s.
By reading Zola, Victor Hugo, Sartre, Camus, Duras, de Beauvoir – not forgetting Tintin and Astérix. In movie theaters, with Truffaut, Malle, LeLouche, Tavernier – and let’s not forget des Bronzes, Pierre Richard, and Louis de Funès.
In front of the TV, the 8:00 p.m. journal Apostrophes – and yes, also Kojak and the Streets of San Francisco dubbed in French, l’Ecole des Fans de Jacques Martin, Le Samedi est à Nous by Michel Drucker.
These were all exceptional teachers. Thanks to them, I managed to survive my French baccalaureate, the oral test, with a presentation of Montesquieu, “De L’esprit des Lois.” 14/20. The answer, if I may, on my grade card: “Could do better.”
(In English) This city is the place where I went to my first rock concert at age 14 – the Rolling Stones at the Pavillon de Paris, the Porte de Pantin, at the northern edge of the city. And I digress here just a minute: That was an unforgettable night, because the concert ended so late – and I was just 14 years old, and with my best friend at the time we had no other way to get back to the other side of the city but to walk. And walking through Paris at night, 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, seeing the city in that way as it began to wake up, is something that I still have a powerful image of.
It’s the city where, before meeting my wife, I first fell in love – with Paris Saint-Germain. (Laughter.)
But as you say, it is also here where I first became aware of being from somewhere. You have it exactly right. My French classmates, my friends, being from the United States, for them it carried with it a range of expectations, of stereotypes. And then when I visited home in the United States, I lived the flipside of that as my American friends held forth on their opinions about France. And it did teach me a pair of lifelong lessons: Countries and cultures are always more complex than they look from the outside; and the best way to get to know a place is to try to learn to see the world through the eyes of the people who live there. And that was the exceptional opportunity that I was given at a young age by coming to France.
It was my first experience as acting as a bridge between communities, paying attention not just to what made them different, but what they had in common. In school, exactly as you said, with my classmates not only from France but from around the world, we discussed it all, we debated it all, we argued about it all – Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis, Afghanistan, the Cold War. All of that was on the table. And I don’t think I knew it at the time, but I was learning to be a diplomat. And as it turns out, I also didn’t need to look far for role models.
Neither my mother nor my stepfather were born here, but both devoted themselves in exceptional ways to bringing France and the United States, the French and the American people, together around the passions that drove them.
For Sam, Paris was first refuge after surviving the Holocaust. And indeed, as he liked to say, Paris is an anagram for Pisar. Taken in by an aunt and an uncle who were among the thousands of Jews who were saved by the righteous villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Sam made it his life’s passion to make the real the axiom “never again.”
He witnessed the reconciliation between France and Germany, the construction of Europe. He believed that there is no such thing as hereditary animosity, that the past does not have to be prologue. But he also believed that we have to remain eternally vigilant, because humanity’s striving for the best can sometimes be overcome by its capacity for the worst.
That’s the message he delivered to countries, to communities around the world, as well as to multiple French and American leaders that he had the opportunity to advise. It was his clarion call when he was made an a grand officier in 2012, underscoring the urgent need, as he put it at the time, “to alert future generations to the existential dangers that threaten to destroy their world as they once destroyed mine.”
When my mother joined Sam here, she threw herself into forging bonds between artists across the Atlantic, leading the American Center in Paris – driven, as she said, upon receiving the honor of commandeur in 2021 by, and I quote, “an unshakable belief in the power of art and culture to bring people together across countries, cultures, religions, [and] races.”
Both dedicated themselves to causes that I’ve tried to carry forward over my decades in public service.
And both found, as I have, that our two nations were uniquely positioned to advance these causes because of the core principles we share, and our ongoing determination – never fully realized – to live up to them.
Our belief in liberty, in equality, in the human rights of all people – the rights of individuals and nations to choose their own path, to forge their own destiny.
Principles for which generations of French and American men and women have made the ultimate sacrifice.
Like the heroes I met earlier this year – alongside you, Mr. President, and President Biden – at the 80th anniversary of D-Day. People like Ben Miller, who was just 19 years old when – on June the 6th, 1944 – he and over a dozen other medics climbed aboard a canvas-covered glider and took off across the English Channel. As they descended, the pilot had to weave between giant telephone poles that the Nazis had planted along the coast. The poles shredded the wings of the glider, but they survived the landing, they clambered out onto Normandy’s beaches. And as Ben later recounted, “I lost my fear after that…because we had too many things to do.” With bombs and bullets raining down, he and other medics dragged wounded soldiers to safety and treated their injuries, saving countless lives.
This coming Tuesday, Ben will be 100 years old.
Our nations’ shared trajectory has been shaped by the extraordinary contributions of individuals like him and the others that you’ve recognized so beautifully, with such dignity, with such elegance, in Normandy, most of whose names and stories we’ll never know.
French and American citizens who led our nations not only in the struggle to defeat tyranny, but also to cure deadly disease, to root out entrenched injustice, to preserve this majestic planet, and so many other endeavors that have improved the lives of our people and people everywhere.
That history impresses on us a special responsibility not merely to preserve the relationship that we inherited, but to build on it, to make it ever stronger.
Especially in this moment, as our republics are being challenged both from inside by growing polarization, a declining faith in democratic institutions; and from the outside by adversaries who are bent on tearing down the system of rules and rights that preceding generations have sacrificed so much to shape and uphold.
If we are to emerge stronger from this time – as we have so often in the past – the United States and France must continue to adapt, to learn from each other, to work together, to make each other better.
And of course, that’s not just the job of our governments.
As one of the most astute observers of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed, “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
So as I prepare my own transition to private life in the days ahead, I’m reminded that the project of maintaining our democracies is and always will be primarily the duty of our citizens.
In that sacred role – and for the rest of my time – I hope to prove worthy of the honor that you’ve given me today.
So, aux armes, citoyens. (Laughter.) Marchons, marchon ensemble.
Vive la France. May God bless America. (Applause.)
