He will rest forever next to philosophers and writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac or Victor Hugo. He will share a mausoleum with scientists such as Marie and Pierre Curie. He will be accompanied by major political figures, including Jean Monnet and Simone Veil. The Armenian Missak Manouchian, shot by the German occupiers in 1944, will enter the Panthéon, the monumental tomb in the center of Paris, reserved for the most illustrious and admired Frenchmen, on February 21 next year. He will be the first foreign hero of the anti-Nazi resistance to receive such a great honor, a tribute to thousands of men and women who fought for the freedom of France and who did not get the recognition they deserved.
Emmanuel Macron announced Manouchian’s enshrinement on Sunday, June 18, the annual day commemorating Charles de Gaulle’s famous speech at the BBC microphone in London in 1940, in which he called for resistance against Hitler’s troops who had gained control of France in a few weeks.
Every year the President of the Republic travels to Mont-Valérien, in Suresnes, on the western outskirts of Paris. In his fortress, on top of a hill with a splendid view of Paris, which served as a prison and where a thousand members of the resistance, also Spanish among them, were executed. It is a place of memory, moving, obligatory pilgrimage for school groups. In addition to the announcement about Manouchian, Macron made it known that all the resisters and retaliators of the Nazis who succumbed at Mont-Valérien will be declared “dead for France”, another simple but important way to honor them.
Manouchian was among the prisoners who ended their days in front of a firing squad from the fortress. Visitors are still shown the preferred location for executions. The Armenian fighter was killed along with 22 of his comrades from the Partisans-Mà d’Obra Immigrant (FTP-MOI) group. His capture and conviction were widely publicized by the Nazi occupiers. They hung a red poster with their photographs on the streets. The legend about these heroic guerrillas grew thanks to a poem dedicated to them by Louis Aragon and a song by Léo Ferré. Eighty years after his death, Manouchian and his wife Mélinée, also a resister, will enter the Pantheon.
Manouchian was born in 1906, under the Ottoman Empire, into a family of Christian Armenian farmers in Adiyaman, in southern Anatolia, a hundred kilometers from the border of present-day Syria. A survivor of the 1915 genocide, Manouchian passed through several orphanages in Lebanon before emigrating to France with a brother in 1925. Tens of thousands of Armenians followed his example, which is why the community of this origin still exists today very numerous in France and has given figures in multiple sectors, such as the singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour.
Self-taught and culturally sensitive, Manouchian worked as a journeyman at the Citroën factory in Paris, while writing poetry and founding several literary magazines. He studied for free at the Sorbonne and frequented libraries. The future resister joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1934 and the Committee for Relief in Armenia, so that the newly created Soviet republic of Armenia would be a refuge for the diaspora of his compatriots. It was the illusion of a first generation of exiles who still trusted Stalin. Then World War II changed everything.
Following the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, Manouchian was arrested and later released. After the Nazi invasion he returned to prison, although he was released. Already as a member of the FTP-MOI, Manouchian participated in the armed struggle and attacks against German troops. It was a very heterogeneous and multinational organization where there were veterans of the Spanish Civil War and numerous Jews. One of the most spectacular coups by Manouchian’s group and his men was to kill Colonel Julius Ritter, a high-ranking Nazi who headed the Service of Obligatory Labor (STO), the agency he sent to Germany, by force, tens of thousands of French.
After falling in a raid by the Germans, the 23 of Manouchian’s group were tried, sentenced to death and shot at Mont-Valérien. The only affiliated woman, Olga Bancic, was sent to Germany and beheaded.
