By welcoming Armenian resistance fighter Missak Manouchian and his comrades fighting against Nazism this Wednesday, France is sending a message about the past and the present. For the first time, immigrants and refugees who resisted the Nazis during World War II enter the republican and secular temple. For the first time the communists. And the children of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Missak and his wife Mélinée.
The remains of the Manouchians – and symbolically their comrades in the resistance, including the Spaniard Celestino Alfonso, executed on February 21, 1944 – entered the monument in central Paris in a highly emotional ceremony. Amid the rise of the far right and the immigration debate, the political strain has also been significant.
The presence of Marine Le Pen and other leaders of the National Regroupment (RN), heir to a party founded by phil-Nazis and collaborators, was an affront to many participants. President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with the communist newspaper L'Humanité: “The forces of the extreme right would do well not to be present.”
Le Pen, officially invited to the National Assembly as leader of the RN, ignored the president's request. He found it “insulting.” The Manouchian Support Committee at the Pantheon also opposed his presence.
It was important for Le Pen to be there and show that she is a normal politician, like the others, who identifies with the values of resistance and enlightenment. Since he took over the leadership of the nationalist and anti-immigrant party more than a decade ago, his entire effort has been to remove it from the corner of the far right and homologate it as the governing party.
Macron, questioned over the recent immigration law and criticized by the left as overly repressive, declared in a celebratory speech: “Missak Manouchian, you come here always drunk with your dreams, Armenia freed from pain, fraternal Europe, the ideal communist “Justice.” “Dignity, French dreams, universal dreams.”
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
The words of the actor and singer Patrick Bruel echoed in the rain of the winter evening at the foot of the Pantheon: “My dear Mélinée, my dear little orphan, in a few hours I will no longer be of this world.” They will be with us this afternoon at 3 p.m It was the letter that Missak Manouchian wrote to Mélinée before the Nazis executed him along with the members of the network he led and which the French police dismantled in November 1943. “At the moment of death,” Missak continued in Bruel’s voice, “I announce that I feel no hatred against the German people or against anyone, everyone will get what they deserve as punishment and reward.”
Serge Avédikian, French-Armenian actor, read out in alphabetical order the names of the 24 resistance fighters of the Manouchian network, also known as the “Red Poster” group, after the Nazi propaganda poster on which they were denounced and which later became a poem Title given by Louis Aragon and a song by Léo Ferré. “Celestino Alfonso,” Avédikian began. “Dead to France!” replied a chorus of students from a military college. Alfonso, whose name was engraved at the entrance to the crypt where Missak and Mélinée Manouchian already rest, is the first Spaniard in the Pantheon. Macron then gave his name and quoted his last letter before he was shot.
The Manouche coffins, carried by the Foreign Legion, walked up the avenue leading to the Pantheon while the stages of their lives were staged: exile, life in France as a Citroën worker, the resistance. In the speech, Macron announced: “Missak Manouchian, you come here with your brothers in arms.” In these words one could hear an echo of the writer André Malraux, who read the entry speech of the great resistance fighter and martyr Jean Moulin into the Pantheon in 1964.
“Foreigners and yet our brothers,” Macron said, quoting Aragon. “French people with love, French people with hope.” Ceremonies like those in the Pantheon are the mirror of a country. A story and an ideal. Manouchian's France – and Alfonso's – is that of human rights, anti-fascist, cosmopolitan, universal. That's France. Or at least part of France.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_