ABSTRACT
The defeat of Germany released energy for new struggles with a more uncertain outcome. ‘The mysterious, cunning, murderous and exquisitely cruel evil against which we are trying to organise an effective fight in France is an enemy of such magnitude that it seems madness, or at least singular presumption, on our part, to attempt to overcome it.’1 In this postwar atmosphere, where speeches still resounded with the raised voices of warlike rhetoric, the Anti-Cancer League officials liked to appear in the guise of ‘combatants’, whose ‘generous’ bravery had ‘the excuse of being absolutely necessary, in the presence of danger’.2 But behind the deliberate melodramatic exaggeration of the proposals and the eloquence of a secretary general who had not forgotten his training as a lawyer, the situation which Robert Le Bret depicted was not so far from reality. The contrast between the enormity of the ambitions, the condition of the cancer organisation and the means which the League had to carry out its programme gave it the right to speak of ‘singular presumption’. When the armistice was signed, everything was still to be done: structures to be invented, the necessary competent staff to be provided, early diagnosis to be made, patients to be monitored, all this on a country-wide scale, at a time when the funds of the association were barely adequate.
