Thread by @cirian75

Just shows how utter shallow, meaningless & hate filled the Leave campaigns anti Germany rhetoric is

"On September 22, 1984, François Mitterrand & Helmut Kohl sealed the Franco-German reconciliation with a handshake that entered history"

#GetBrexitGone

bfmtv.com/international/…

On September 22, 1984, French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl , gathered in Verdun to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the First World War, exchange a long handshake. An unexpected gesture and unimaginable at the time, while a few months earlier

Germany had not been invited to celebrate the forty years of landing in Normandy.

At the foot of the ossuary of Douaumont, the two men gather themselves, standing upright, their faces closed, in front of a coffin covered with the flags of the two formerly irreconcilable countries. The German anthem has just been sung,

François Mitterrand glances at the German Chancellor and offers him his hand. Helmut Kohl seized her and the two men remained so tied while the Marseillaise sounded.

A spontaneous handshake?

This gesture, widely commented, has become the symbol of Franco-German reconciliation . While many observers at the time felt that this handshake was premeditated, François Mitterrand will provide the opposite in a given interview a few years later.

"We did not talk about it in the least, but we were standing in front of the coffin (), instinctively, I remember, I turned to him, I reached out his hand. time, "he said.

This rapprochement between the French president and the German chancellor echoed the emotionally charged embrace of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and General de Gaulle in 1963, during the signing of the Elysée Treaty establishing Franco-German cooperation. .

But the handshake between Mitterrand and Kohl had a much greater symbolic burden, the two leaders taking Verdun to witness the deaths.

France & Germany maturely put both world wars behind them, now the firmest of friends

Yet UK politicians like
Johnson and Farage still use it to score points

Why? because they have no substance behind them & Germany is an easy target for their low brow tactics

#GetBrexitGone

Mitterrand fought in WW2 and was a POW, after the surrender he initially worked for Vichy France but very quickly became a resistance organiser and spy

Helmut Kohl was just young enough to avoid actual combat & saw the ruined post war Germany

They put the wars behind them