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President Donald Trump fully understood the moment by uttering words that called poetry to simplicity.
Turning away from a crowd gathered among the fallen American tombs in Normandy, he gazed at the old faces of their peers who were living and who never forgot the horror of the beaches below. He was praised by men, many of whom can no longer stand each other, who had once again crossed the ocean – as they did three quarters of a century ago to save freedom.
"You are the glory of our republic and we thank you wholeheartedly," said Trump.
"You are among the greatest Americans who will ever live," said Trump. "Today, we express our eternal gratitude."
A group of hollow-cheeked veterans, proudly wearing the chest medals and baseball caps bearing the honors of the fight, was greeted with applause. Three comrades directly behind Trump's podium huddled under one blanket – as in a former foxhole.
Any visit to the scene of death in Normandy is humiliating and inspiring. When world leaders gather to mark historic anniversaries, emotions become even more intense. The names, ages, and backgrounds of deceased people etched on their graves illustrate the random horror of a world war.
But there was something different, even more poignant and final in the anniversary commemorations of D-Day this year.
Trump, hitting rare emotional and unifying notes on the part of the Americans and what was once called the free world, was in fact a farewell to the greatest generation.
For once, the rhetoric of division and dislocation aroused by its approach to the presidency and the reaction of its opponents in this regard have been forgotten.
There was a sense that a broader cultural and political chapter – which has helped define life in the West over the past 75 years – is ending, leaving an uncertain future.
The last of the old guard
France commemorates D-Day every June, but the biggest events usually mark a five-year interval, resulting in a parade of US presidents on sacred battlefields and cemeteries.
Each time, the ranks of the old soldiers are exhausted considerably. This year, 173 US veterans attended World War II, including 65 on D-Day.
The leaders and politicians who ordered their men to go up to the Nazi fire on the morning of June 6, 1944 have long since disappeared. Those who remain to testify – rightly – are infantrymen who braved the carnage as they landed en mbade to save freedom.
Anyone aged 20 who has struggled to get to Omaha Beach or jumped from a twin-engined Dakota in a fiery flak sky that day will be 100 years old at the time of the next big rally in Normandy.
Some veterans will probably survive to make the trip, but the reality is that Thursday's group of nonagenarians represented the last great pilgrimage to the place where so many of their comrades are.
Their courage will be remembered when they leave – the French's gratitude to the Americans for their liberation is the cement of the country's relations.
But it will not be exactly the same when elderly men, with their canes and wheelchairs, no longer share their war stories as the trauma of their memories emerges in their eyes.
Trump – along with French President Emmanuel Macron at the American military cemetery and other Allied leaders on other landing beaches – were not just saying goodbye to a dwindling army of veterans on Thursday.
They also marked the end of a pivotal pbadage in history that gave way to a time when the institutions forged as a result of the turbulence of the Second World War were seriously put to the test.
Trump's speech was a fitting tribute to the veterans and allies of the United States: "The nobility and courage" of the British, the "robust Canadians", the "fighting Poles", the "gallant French", "the Australians intrepid "and the" harsh Norwegians ".
But it did not offer any broader reflection on the thorny political issues raised by this moment in history – nor on the lessons that the D-day generation can offer to the world today.
The shadow of the second world war
It is impossible to overestimate the shadow of the Second World War on the politics and culture of the next age.
D-Day was a particularly powerful moment – it marked the point where America officially took over from war-ravaged Britain and its torn empire as the world's leading power.
It was a day when a multinational operation of high risk and logistically complicated, with a higher objective – the defeat of tyranny – went against the objectives of a demonstration of human ingenuity. He summoned a global unity unit impossible to imagine in today 's fractured politics.
In the years that followed, some countries built their self-image around the Second World War, for better or for worse.
"The UK is still considered the daring defender who survived World War II (…) against a Nazi-controlled continental Europe," Chathn House director Robin Niblett told CNN International on Tuesday. .
The feeling of Britain as a courageous underdog, able to lead its own battles and remain independent, has been at the center of the debate over Brexit, which is full of references in wartime.
He also ignores that the tide was reversed when the United States put their power to the test and that, after the enormous sacrifices made by Russia, they blew Hitler's armies to the East.
In America, D-Day and its clear moral framework of struggle between good and evil constitute a national memory less troublesome than the social and emotional upheaval of the wars of Vietnam and Iraq.
In retrospect, the Second World War looks like a sepia moment that resonates with national unity and seems impossible to imagine in the twenty-first century in anger.
It is natural that memories of history also erase. This may explain the rise of right-wing populism in Europe in recent years – a political tide that has been stifled for decades by memories of fascism.
For years, presidents of the United States and European leaders have been content to write simple and uniform stories of common glory during the Second World War and the post-Cold War period rather than relaunch the Transatlantic alliance for the future. Now, they will have to make much more effort because soon, there will be no one alive who will remember the pain and glory of these years of war.
For years, institutions such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union, which the largest generation sacrificed to build, have not only ensured prosperity, but also curbed the continental conflict which twice in the twentieth century dragged the United States into bloody European battlefields.
But now, with the rise of China, as Russia tries to regain lost influence and as the US president, all peoples seem more willing to demolish established structures than to strengthen or modernize them, everything seems fragile.
Macron, addressing the US veterans, vowed to fight to uphold the values for which they fought, despite his compromised political status and the increasingly advanced challenges for his internationalist worldview.
"We must stay true to their memory and do this without ever giving up on what their sacrifice has caused," said Macron, born 33 years after D-Day.
"The promise of Normandy will be supported by France with all its might, and I promise that it will, and that this is also at the heart of America's destiny," Macron said in his own speech in front of the United States. great generation.
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