Today's Date:

Speech made by Ambassador of France to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, before receiving the King Legacy Award for International Service 2004

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends,

You will forgive me, I hope, for feeling rather overwhelmed, this sunday morning, as I am here to receive the King Legacy Award for International Service, which goes each year to a personality who helped spread Martin Luther King’s message internationally.

It is really a tremendous honor to have been chosen among so many and such deserving candidates, as well as an enormous pleasure, to receive such a prestigious award, an award which was bestowed, before me, upon inspiring such leaders as Kofi Annan and Colin Powell.

First of all, I would like to express my profound gratitude, both on my own behalf as Ambassador of France to the United States, and on behalf of the French Embassy and the French Government, which you are also honoring through me, and to tell you, from the bottom of my heart, both in English and in French, thank you, merci.

Indeed, in receiving this award, which pays tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King, jr., how could I fail to be overwhelmed, given the stature of the man and the strength of his message—a message that transcends time, continents and generations.

Deeply devoted to the causes of peace and justice, Martin Luther King will go down in history as someone who, transcending hatred and all forms of oppression, had a dream—that of a world without barriers and without conflicts.

That message is deeply anchored here, in the United States of America, a country he himself so greatly transformed. Your presence today, and the tribute you pay to him, testify to his continued relevance and undiminished strength.

But his message is also a universal one addressed to the entire world—to every nation, every government, every human being.

Dr. King once said: “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Current events in the world show us how much work remains to be done in order to fulfil his dream and become worthy of it.

Together, with the United States, with its partners in the European Union, with the United Nations, with its friends and allies, France is seeking to promote this message: by working staunchly on behalf of peace and understanding between nations and cultures; by relentlessly fighting terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; by resolutely combating the great pandemics and the triple scourge of racism, poverty and underdevelopment.

I am confident that international cooperation and mobilization will enable us to make significant progress in those areas in the years to come. That is France’s belief and its dearest hope. It is the challenge it intends to meet, together with its allies. this is, indeed, its message. this is, moreover, its vocation.

We are all so focused on Iraq that we tend to forget that crises exist elsewhere . As French Ambassador, I want to draw your attention to the crises in Africa. I visited the Great Lakes region three times, leading United Nations Security Council missions. How many people know that three million africans died in only four years, in one of the bloodiest conflicts in the world ? How many know, and who cares? Well, the U.N. cares and has deployed a peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where slowly peace and hope are returning. In West Africa, too, the U.N. is deeply involved, with peacekeeping operations deployed in Sierra Leone and in Liberia. We hope that soon a third one will be deployed in Cote d’Ivoire, where 4,000 French troops, together with African troops, are helping to imlplement a political settlement that will bring back peace and development for millions of Africans.

let us not forget Africa, and let us not forget the unique and positive role of the United Nations!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Were the words “let men remember that they are brothers” pronounced by Martin Luther King? let me ask you the question.

here is my answer: yes and no.

Yes, because, in his own way and words, he made them his own. Indeed, in a speech he delivered in Saint Louis, Missouri, on march 22, 1964, he declared : “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

yet the answer is also no, for this sentence was pronounced some 200 years earlier by the French philosopher Voltaire, one of the most eminent figures of the enlightenment, which gave birth to the French Revolution and modern France.

I am sure you perfectly well understood my point in putting together today, in front of you, these two messages of peace, so relevant and so similar, even if they are separated by more than two hundred years.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are closely united by this vision of a world of justice and peace that spans centuries and continents. For the dream expressed by Martin Luther King is also a dream cherished by France. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” — the famous motto of the French Republic — might be said to sum up the work of Dr. King, as he strove to bring to fruition in the hearts and the minds of all the revolutions that others began on this Earth.

This award, which bears his name, and which you so kindly bestowed upon me today, and upon France, bears witness to this fraternity of thought and vision.

Once again, I ask you to please accept my deepest thanks./.