The Great Dictator Speech Analysis: Charlie Chaplin's Powerful Speech Against Dictatorship & Tyranny

Start hereThe speech is the climax of a film about a dictator. Yet the dictator never gives it: a Jewish barber, mistaken for him, does. So whose words are they?

01Contextual Setting

The speech is the last scene of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). The film historian Jeffrey Vance, in an essay for the US Library of Congress, calls it a five-minute speech.

Two roles, one face

Chaplin plays two roles: a little Jewish barber living in the ghetto, and Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia, a parody of Adolf Hitler. The film’s joke is that the two men look alike.

How the barber ends up on the platform

The American Film Institute’s catalogue sums up the plot. Here it is in four steps.

1. At the end of the First World War, the barber saves the life of an officer, Schultz. A plane crash leaves the barber with amnesia, and he spends years in hospital while Hynkel rises to power.

2. Back in his shop in the ghetto, he resists the persecution around him. He is arrested with Schultz, who has also spoken out, and both are sent to a prison camp.

3. They escape on the eve of Hynkel’s invasion of the neighbouring country, Osterlich. Hynkel himself is mistaken for the escaped barber and arrested.

4. The barber, taken for the dictator, takes his place on the parade platform and gives the speech.

So the man the regime persecutes speaks to the soldiers in front of him and to everyone listening.

02Rhetorical Analysis

The speech moves in four steps: it turns down power, names what has gone wrong, finds hope, and appeals to the soldiers. The quotations below follow the transcript of the speech published on Chaplin’s official website.

How the speech is built

1. A refusal. It opens by turning down power: “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor”. The barber says he does not want to rule or conquer anyone.

2. A diagnosis. The world could provide for everyone, he says, but people have lost the way. “Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate”, and has marched people into misery and bloodshed. The failure is moral, not technical: “We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity”.

3. A turn to hope. The same inventions point the other way: “The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together”. Their very nature, the speech says, cries out for the goodness in people and for the unity of all.

4. An appeal to the soldiers. He speaks straight to the troops. He tells them not to give themselves to brutes: “You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!” He closes with “Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

Universal Themes

The speech names its themes plainly. It asks for kindness and freedom, an end to national barriers, and a world of reason, where science and progress lead to everyone’s happiness.

It cites one text, the 17th chapter of St Luke, where it says “the Kingdom of God is within man”. The King James Version of Luke 17:21 reads “the kingdom of God is within you”. The speech widens it: not in one man or one group of men, but in all men.

Satire and Irony

The irony is in who is speaking. The man the regime persecutes stands where the tyrant should be. He uses the tyrant’s platform to ask for the opposite of everything the regime stands for.

The speech does not mock the regime’s ideas from inside. It rejects them outright.

Whether the speaker is still the barber is a matter of reading, and two sources put it differently.

Chaplin’s official site describes the ending as a speech “made by the barber, speaking Chaplin’s own words”. Vance goes further: “The final speech, however, is not given by the Barber character but by Chaplin himself”. In his reading, Chaplin drops his comic mask and speaks directly to the world.

Both readings describe the same scene. The second helps explain why the tone changes so completely.

Refusal“I don't want to be an emperor.”

Diagnosis“Greed has poisoned men's souls”

Hope“The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together.”

Appeal“Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

03Why Chaplin made it, and what it cost him

Chaplin made the film while the United States was still out of the war, and he faced pressure against it from the start. The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first film with dialogue. He came to dialogue more than a decade after the rest of the film industry had accepted talking pictures.

Made before the United States joined the war

Britain, Chaplin’s native country, had declared war at the beginning of September 1939. The United States, where he lived, had resolved to keep out of the conflict.

The film opened in New York on 15 October 1940, at two Broadway theatres at once. The United States entered the Second World War only after the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

Pressure from the start

Production Code files cited by the AFI catalogue record a letter from October 1938. In it the German consul, George Gyssling, wrote to Joseph I. Breen objecting to Chaplin’s intention to make a film that would burlesque Hitler. Chaplin went ahead despite death threats once his project was announced.

Born four days apart

Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889, and Hitler within four days of him. Chaplin’s official site notes that in 1939, while he was writing the film, he was as famous worldwide as Hitler. His tramp character wore the same moustache.

Chaplin’s later view

Chaplin later saw the film differently. In his 1964 autobiography, as Vance quotes it, he wrote that had he known “the actual horrors of the German concentration camps”, he could not have made the film. He went on: “I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis”.

In our reading, satire was possible in 1940 in a way it was not once the camps were known.

Banned, and still a success

The film was banned throughout occupied Europe, in parts of South America and in the Irish Free State. It was first seen in Germany and Italy only when it was reissued in 1958.

It cost $1,403,526 and was Chaplin’s most profitable film up to that time. It earned $5 million worldwide in its original release.

04Enduring Impact

A divided reception

The speech divided opinion at first, and its standing has risen since. The AFI catalogue records that contemporary reviews “objected to the final speech as too preachy”. Chaplin’s official site says many people thought it unnecessary to the film, while others found it uplifting.

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther found the film too long in places, as Vance reports. He still praised it as a superb achievement by a great artist.

A growing reputation

Vance writes that critical opinion of the film, especially of the final speech, has risen greatly in the decades since. In 1989, the centenary of Chaplin’s birth, it opened the Moscow International Film Festival. In 2002 it closed the Berlin Film Festival.

Vance also passes on a story about Hitler. According to an agent who fled Germany after working in the film division of the Nazi Ministry of Culture, Hitler screened the film alone, two evenings running. Chaplin’s reply, as Vance quotes it: “I’d give anything to know what he thought of it”.

05Why It Resonates

Part of why the speech lasts may be that it names things that do not date: greed, fear, cleverness without kindness, and ordinary people’s power to refuse. It is a speech against dictatorship given by a character who, a moment earlier, was one of its victims.

A famous speech travels in pieces. Putting a line back in its scene, its moment and its speaker’s mouth can show what it meant.

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• The speech's wording follows the transcript on Chaplin's official website; quotations from it are kept short.
• Plot details come from the American Film Institute's catalogue. Dates, costs and the film's reception come mostly from Jeffrey Vance's National Film Registry essay for the Library of Congress, read in an archived copy.
• Chaplin's 1964 autobiography is quoted as Vance quotes it.
• Whether the speaker is the barber or Chaplin himself is a matter of reading; the page gives both sources.
• The story that Hitler screened the film twice rests on one agent's account, as Vance passes it on.

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