If the names of Lucie Aubrac, Joséphine Baker, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion, among others, are not unknown to you, you may have never heard of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Blanche Paugam, Paulette Sarcey, Nancy Wake… They all have in common having fought in the ranks of the Resistance during the Second World War. These “forgotten by history” however have nothing to envy in terms of bravery and commitment to their male counterparts.
For the third edition of the Panthéon program called “An evening in the heights”, Ariane Pawin, Fred Pougeard and Christian Tardif have chosen to highlight the stories of the exploits of this feminine “army of shadows”. Skilfully mixing historical reality and fiction, they imagine themselves for the occasion transformed into DPLG spectrologists (“graduated by the government”) responsible for a mission of the utmost importance: to explain why, since November 30, 2021, date of the hen Josephine Baker entered the Panthéon, the night watchmen of the Parisian monument noticed a change in the polarity of the place between the top and the bottom.
everyday heroines
Richly nourished by in-depth research in various historical works on the Second World War and by testimonies of resistance fighters, famous and anonymous, this original storytelling walk takes visitors-spectators from the nave of the Pantheon (deserted at this late hour) to the top of the dome (35 meters high). The 360-degree panoramic view of Paris has to be earned, with the 206 stone and iron steps to climb to reach it.
This course, halfway between history lessons and storytelling, is full of anecdotes of all kinds illustrating the courage of these little-known fighters.
The three storytellers take breaks during this ascent and take it in turns to narrate the feats of arms of these everyday heroines, such as Blanche Paugam (1898-1945), the first French woman sentenced to death by the Germans for acts of resistance. , in 1940 – she had cut electric cables in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in Pas-de-Calais (at her trial, she simply declared: “I cut 36 of them. I would have cut more if I could have done so”), her sentence was commuted to forced labor, she died in deportation in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen (Lower Saxony). Or like the German Marianne Cohn (1922-1944) made famous by her poem I will betray tomorrow, written in 1943 while incarcerated in France.
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