CÉLÉBRATION DU 250ème ANNIVERSAIRE DE L’INDÉPENDANCE DES USA

UN SALUT À L’AMÉRIQUE

Par Marco Rubio, Secrétaire d’état des USA

Il y a deux cent cinquante ans aujourd’hui, dans une salle de briques de Philadelphie, nos ancêtres proclamaient leur indépendance de l’empire le plus puissant du monde. Ils n’étaient pas des fous. Ils savaient parfaitement ce que les mots inscrits sur ce parchemin allaient signifier. Ils savaient qu’à cet instant précis, ils se condamnaient eux-mêmes pour trahison aux yeux de leur patrie – et que la peine pour trahison était la mort. Aussi, au bas de ce document, sous les paroles solennelles proclamant des vérités évidentes et les droits de l’homme, ils écrivirent une ultime phrase : « Confiants en la protection de la divine Providence, nous nous engageons mutuellement, l’un envers l’autre, sur nos vies, nos biens et notre honneur. »

Leurs vies, leurs biens et leur honneur – tout ce qu’ils possédaient et tout ce qu’ils étaient. Tout était en jeu. Songez à ces hommes. On l’oublie facilement : il ne s’agissait pas de miséreux sans ressources, sans rien à perdre. Ils comptaient parmi les hommes les plus prospères et les plus influents de leur époque. Avocats, marchands, riches propriétaires terriens et planteurs – des hommes avec des familles, des fermes et des fortunes. Le bon sens aurait voulu qu’ils soient les derniers à mener une révolution – et encore moins à risquer tout, jusqu’à leur vie, pour cela. Mais ils l’ont fait malgré tout. Et ils l’ont fait malgré des obstacles insurmontables.

D’un côté se trouvait l’Empire britannique – la puissance la plus redoutable que le monde ait jamais connue. De l’autre, une poignée de colonies aux confins du monde connu, avec une économie agricole modeste et une armée hétéroclite de fermiers et de miliciens mal entraînés – ce qu’un général britannique de l’époque qualifiait avec mépris de « parade grotesque » et de « populace en armes ». En 1776, rares étaient ceux qui croyaient que ces rebelles américains avaient la moindre chance de gagner. De l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, les élites britanniques les considéraient comme une simple nuisance, et rien de plus. Le ministre de la Marine royale déclara que « le simple coup de canon les emporterait… aussi vite que leurs jambes le leur permettraient ». Le général James Grant, ancien gouverneur royal de Floride orientale, se vanta devant la Chambre des communes de bien connaître les Américains et affirma qu’« ils n’oseraient jamais affronter une armée anglaise ». Le roi George lui-même prédit qu’« une fois que ces rebelles auront reçu un coup dur, ils se rendront ». Les premiers mois de la guerre semblèrent leur donner raison. L’armée de George Washington était courageuse, mais affamée, mal entraînée et mal approvisionnée. Ses soldats avaient quitté leurs fermes, leurs commerces et leurs colonies frontalières pour se battre pour leur pays, pour finalement enchaîner les défaites cuisantes. En décembre 1776, la Révolution était au bord de l’effondrement. L’armée continentale avait été chassée de New York, avait traversé le New Jersey et s’était réfugiée en Pennsylvanie, vaincue et transie par le froid hivernal du nord-est. Ses effectifs diminuaient rapidement. Ce mois-là, George Washington écrivit à son frère : « Je crois que la partie est presque terminée. »

À moins d’un changement radical, la cause de l’indépendance s’éteindrait, la rébellion serait écrasée et ceux qui avaient tout risqué pour la mener seraient pendus comme traîtres à la Couronne. Mais ils ne se rendirent pas. Ce n’est pas dans la nature des Américains. La nuit de Noël, Washington rassembla ce qui restait de son armée et traversa le fleuve Delaware glacé à la faveur de l’obscurité. Ses hommes marchèrent toute la nuit, les chaussures déchirées et les pieds enveloppés de haillons, laissant des traces de sang dans la neige. À Trenton, ils frappèrent. Quelques jours plus tard, à Princeton, ils frappèrent de nouveau. Deux victoires retentissantes – et l’aura d’une victoire britannique inévitable commença à se fissurer. Pourtant, un seul miracle ne suffisait pas à mener les patriotes à la victoire. La guerre s’éternisa. L’année suivante, les Britanniques s’emparèrent de Philadelphie et le Congrès continental fut contraint de fuir. L’armée de Washington regagna péniblement ses quartiers d’hiver à Valley Forge – affamée, transie de froid et démunie.

NB. Une traduction de Google, révisée et certifiée par Jean Hénoc Faroul

Le Texte original

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, in a brick hall in Philadelphia, our forefathers declared their independence from the most powerful empire on earth.

They were not fools. They knew exactly what the words on that parchment would mean. They knew that in that moment, they were convicting themselves of treason in the eyes of their mother country – and that the penalty for treason was death.

And so at the bottom of that document, beneath the soaring words about self-evident truths and the rights of man, they wrote one final sentence: “With a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Their lives, their fortunes, and their honor – everything they had and everything they were. All of it was on the line.

Think about the kind of men we’re talking about here. It’s easy to forget: These were not impoverished, destitute paupers with nothing to lose. They were some of the most successful and prosperous men of their day. Lawyers, merchants, wealthy landowners and planters – men with families, with farms, with fortunes.

Common sense would dictate that they would be the last to lead a revolution – let alone risk everything, including their lives, to do it.

But they did it anyways.

And they did it against impossible odds.

On one side was the British Empire – the most formidable power the world had ever seen. On the other was a scattering of colonies at the final edge of the known world, with a small agricultural economy and a ragtag force of poorly trained farmers and militiamen – what one British General at the time scoffed at as “a preposterous parade” and “a rabble in arms.”

Very few people in 1776 believed these American rebels stood a fighting chance. Across the Atlantic, the elites in Great Britain dismissed them as a minor nuisance, and nothing more. The cabinet minister for the Royal Navy declared, “the very sound of a cannon would carry them off…as fast as their feet could carry them.” General James Grant – the former royal governor of East Florida – boasted to the House of Commons that he knew the Americans very well, and “they would never dare to face an English army.” King George himself predicted, “once those rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit.”

The early months of the war seemed to prove them right. George Washington’s army was brave, but hungry, untrained, and poorly supplied. They had left their farms, shops, and frontier settlements to fight for their country – only to lurch from defeat to devastating defeat.

By December of 1776, the Revolution was near collapse. The Continental Army had been chased out of New York, across New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania – beaten and freezing in the frigid northeastern winter. The army itself was rapidly shrinking in size. That month, George Washington wrote to his brother: “I think the game is pretty nearly up.” Unless something changed, the cause of independence would die, the rebellion would be crushed, and the men who had risked everything to lead it would be hanged as traitors to the Crown.

But they did not surrender. That’s not what Americans do.

On Christmas night, Washington gathered what remained of his army and crossed the icy Delaware River under the cover of darkness. His men marched through the night with broken shoes and rags wrapped around their feet, leaving blood in the snow. At Trenton, they struck. A few days later, at Princeton, they struck again.

Two resounding victories – and the aura of inevitable British victory began to crack.

Still, one miracle was not enough to carry the patriots to victory. The war dragged on. The next year, the British captured Philadelphia, and the Continental Congress was forced to flee. Washington’s army staggered into their winter quarters at Valley Forge – starving, freezing, and barely clothed, sleeping in huts they had built with their own hands. There, in that brutal winter, something extraordinary happened. The Continental Army did not collapse. It was transformed into a disciplined, hardened, professional fighting force: trained by Prussian officers, bound together by common sacrifice, the Americans emerged – against all odds – as an army that could bring down an empire, powered by an unbreakable belief in the country they were bringing into being.

Every American knows what happened next.

From the beginning, Americans have done the impossible. It is who we are. It runs in our people’s blood.

It is the deepest and most fundamental feature of the American soul, dating back long before the Revolution. We saw it in the wood forts of Jamestown, in the first colonies of Plymouth, on the decks of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria carrying Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic to the shores of a new world. It is a spirit that scoffs at constraints, that yearns for new frontiers; a boundless ambition to do what others can’t, to go where others won’t, to venture out into the darkness and find what lies beyond the horizon.

America was not a clean break from the past, but the culmination of an ancient story that began millennia ago. We owe much of ourselves to the very country our Founders went to war with 250 years ago: As President Trump said earlier this year, “this land was settled and forged by men [whose] veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage”; whose language, culture, and fierce love of liberty was a “majestic inheritance” from their ancestors across the sea. Our destiny was shaped, over centuries, in the kingdoms and empires of Europe, before bursting forth onto this continent to build a new world in its image. The philosophers of Athens, the imperial majesty of Rome, the monks and kings of medieval Christendom planted its seeds – centuries of European exploration, science, faith, and restless ambition finally unleashed from every constraint on the boundless American frontier.

America was the destiny of an entire civilization. It was here, in our country, where thousands of years of history came to fruition, and painted the fullness of their promise on the blank canvas of a new world.

And look at what that has wrought.

In a mere two and a half centuries – a blink of an eye, in the full view of history – Americans have blown past any and every precedent that came before us. From microchips and atoms to railroads and rockets, across every new frontier and plane of human progress, we not only transformed a wild and unmapped land into the most powerful nation on earth; we carried the whole of mankind into a new age of history.

We didn’t do these things because we had to. We did them because we could. Because no one else had ever done them before. Because Americans have always been pioneers – the sons and daughters of the frontier. There is nowhere we can’t go. There is nothing we can’t do.

And for us, the frontier has never closed. When we ran out of land at the westward edge of this continent, we began to build upward – airplanes and skyscrapers that pierced the horizon. When we ran out of sky, we went further still, building machines that could carry us to the moon.

Now, we stand at the dawn of another new age, filled with new frontiers and possibilities that our forefathers could scarcely have dreamed. And just as we have in every chapter that came before, Americans will lead this one, too.

We Americans are the creating people: the spirit of world history is here, on this land, in our hands.

This is who we are. For 250 years, this has been a land of miracles, where larger-than-life men have done larger-than-life things. Tonight, we rededicate ourselves to our country, and to the sacred duty of ensuring that America’s future will be every bit as proud as her past.

Marco Rubio was sworn in as the 72nd Secretary of State on January 21, 2025. The Secretary is creating a Department of State that puts America First.

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