Philippe Pétain Quotes
Family, Nation, Work!
Henri Phillippe Petain, 1856-1951, French Field Marshall, Collaborator and President of Vichy France, Vichy France Slogan of World War II
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This may be Kennedy’s most famous line. However he was not the first orator to express this idea however. See Khalil Gibran {601423}, Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}, St. John Broderick {595734}, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707} for earlier expressions of similar sentiments. Holmes seems to be the first to express the idea while the earliest seems similar phraseology seems to be the British Politician St. John Broderick in 1893 {595734}. Although, these earlier expressions existed, Theodore C. Sorensen, who assisted Kennedy with this speech and wrote the draft, had distilled it from earlier expressions and views of JFK and said that these were Kennedy’s words. At the time, he stated that was unaware of the Gibran, Harding, Broderick and Holmes sentiments. Gibran had not yet even been translated into English. However it is not clear whether Kennedy himself had inadvertently recollected the phrase from any of the other quotations. (The question was never put to him.) The St. John Broderick quotation is a possible source. Kennedy was quite familiar with British political history, and his father and been U. S. Ambassador to Great Britain. Regardless, the quotation was as great for the place and timing—his inaugural—as it was for the phraseology which might have originated elsewhere.
This quotation might have been an inspiration for the famous JFK quotation {589867}. See Khalil Gibran {601423}, Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707} for similar sentiments. Holmes preceded Broderick by a few years, but Broderick came closest to the Kennedy phraseology.
The Society of Cincinnati was formed just after the Revolutionary War by officers of the army, to perpetuate friendships, to aid each other and the widows and orphans of members, and to honor their French allies and comrades:
Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Pétain, generally known as Philippe Pétain (/peɪˈtæ̃/, French: [filip petɛ̃]), Marshal Pétain (Maréchal Pétain) and sometimes, The Old Marshal (Le Vieux Maréchal), was a French general officer who attained the position of Marshal of France at the end of World War I, during which he became known as The Lion of Verdun (Le Lion de Verdun). In collaboration with Nazi Germany, he then served as the Chief of State of Vichy France from 1940 to 1944. Pétain, who was 84 years old in 1940, ranks as France's oldest head of state.
