The technique which he adopted would not have been sacessful
had he not been able to bring to it the resources of an acute intelli- gence, a deep human sympathy and a vivid imagination. He realised that his compatriots were at first too stunned by misery to be receptive of any but the lightest forms of invective or the gentlest forms of stimulation. He realised that the difficulties of reception in France would render his audience unwilling to listen to long rhetorical discourses or to detailed descriptions of the war production of Great Britain and the United States. He realised from the outset that there was one thing which he could provide which neither Vichy nor the Germans could ever provide, and that was the un- varnished truth. He thus, in the dark years, gained the confidence, and increased the numbers, of his audience by providing them with news bulletins of almost stark realism. His most brilliant device during the months of despair was to cast his anti-Vichy and anti- German propaganda into easy little nursery rhymes sung to easy nursery tunes. A second device was the brilliant dialogue of "Les trois antis" in which the falsifications of Vichy propaganda were exposed in the form of witty conversations between three typical Frenchmen. Any more formidable denunciation would have been almost intolerable to the shattered nerves of those whom, between 1940 and 1942, he was seeking to convince. By the form which he adopted he aroused nostalgic longing for the old France of nursery tradition and the old France of sparkling logic, while bringing his method into sharp contradiction to the invective and denunciations of the Germans and the Vichyssois. He gave his audience truth, amusement and repose. * * * *
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