France, by welcoming Armenian resistance fighter Missak Manouchian and his comrades fighting against Nazism this Wednesday, sends a message about the past and the present. For the first time, immigrants and refugees who resisted the Nazis during the Second World War enter the republican and secular temple. For the first time, the communists. And the children of the Armenian genocide of 1915 under the Ottoman Empire: Missak and his wife Mélinée.
The remains of the Manouchians – and, symbolically, of their resistance comrades, including the Spaniard Celestino Alfonso, executed on February 21, 1944 – enter the monument in central Paris in an emotionally charged ceremony. In the context of the rise of the far right and the immigration debate, the political weight has also been considerable.
The presence of Marine Le Pen and the other leaders of the National Rally (RN), heir to a party founded by pro-Nazis and collaborators, was an affront to many participants. President Emmanuel Macron declared this in an interview with the communist newspaper Humanity: “Far-right forces would do well not to be present.”
Le Pen, officially invited as head of the RN to the National Assembly, ignored the president’s request. He considered it “offensive”. The Manouchian Support Committee of the Pantheon was also against his presence.
For Le Pen it was important to be there too and demonstrate that she was a normal politician, like the others, identified with the values of the Resistance and the Enlightenment. His entire effort, since he took the reins of the nationalist and anti-immigration party more than ten years ago, has consisted of removing it from the corner of the far right and establishing it as the government party.
Macron, questioned about the recent immigration law, criticized by the left for being excessively repressive, declared in a solemn speech: “Missak Manouchian, come here always drunk on your dreams, Armenia freed from pain, fraternal Europe, the communist ideal, justice, dignity, French dreams, universal dreams”.
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The words of the actor and singer Patrick Bruel resonate in the winter evening rain, 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 shoot us this afternoon at 3pm.” This is the letter that Missak Manouchian wrote to Mélinée before the Nazis executed him together with the members of the network he led, and which the French police dismantled in November 1943. “At the time of dying,” Missak continued in his voice. Bruel: “I proclaim that I have no hatred against the German people or against anyone, everyone will have what they deserve as punishment and reward.”
Serge Avédikian, French-Armenian actor, reads, in alphabetical order, the names of the 24 resisters of the Manouchian network, also known as the Red Posters group, from the name of the Nazi propaganda poster that denounced them, which then gave the title to a poem by Louis Aragon and a song by Léo Ferré. “Celestino Alfonso,” Avédikian began. “Dead for France!”, responded the chorus of students from a military high school. Alfonso, whose name was inscribed at the entrance to the crypt where Missak and Mélinée Manouchian already rest, is the first Spaniard at the Pantheon. Macron later invoked his name and quoted his last letter before he was shot.
The Manouchian coffins, transported by the Foreign Legion, went up the avenue that leads 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 proclaimed: “Missak Manouchian, you enter here with your brothers in arms.” In these words one could hear the echo of the writer André Malraux, who in 1964 read the speech at the entrance to the Pantheon of the great resister and martyr Jean Moulin.
“Foreigners and yet our brothers,” Macron said, quoting Aragon. “French by preference, French by hope”. Ceremonies like the Pantheon are the mirror of a country. A story and an ideal. The France of Manouchian – and of Alfonso – is that of human rights, of anti-fascism, of openness to the world, of the universal. This is France. Or at least part of France.
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