On Friday, September 5, French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot awarded the Légion d'Honneur to Jean-Louis Bourlanges, who served 18 years in the European Parliament before being elected in 2017 to the Assemblée Nationale, where he chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee. Both men are members of the same centrist party, the MoDem, led by François Bayrou, who would serve as prime minister for three more days. Here are extracts from the speech Bourlanges made.
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Two French baby boomers on what their generation got wrong
(…) My generation, the children of the postwar era, those who today are referred to, with more or less pitying condescension, as "boomers," does not have a good reputation. We are accused of having inherited much, invented too little, abused our position considerably and above all of having failed to meet the terrible challenges posed by a history that has become ungrateful, severe and threatening, a history that is increasingly being made without us and, now, from Washington to Shanghai via Moscow, even against us.
My generation received an immense legacy from the one that preceded it and, as I prepare to lay down my burden, I do indeed feel that the men and women of my time were not fully up to this inheritance. I was fortunate that the first part of my life followed in the footsteps of two remarkable figures: my mother and General de Gaulle. In their own ways, one at the very bottom, the other at the very top, they were for me both the symbols and the actors of a France of courage, effort and valor which, after the terrible ordeals of two wars, managed to find its way toward freedom, solidarity, growth and progress. (...)
