“Missak Manouchian must enter the Pantheon with all his comrades”

2023-11-23 10:00:01

Mr. President of the Republic, we are writing this letter to you in the hope of preventing injustice. You announced on June 18 your choice to bring into the Pantheon the remains of Missak Manouchian and his wife, Mélinée, in February 2024, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the resistance group to the Nazi occupation and to his French colleagues. On February 21, 1944, twenty-two men were shot at Mont-Valérien. The only woman in their network was beheaded in Stuttgart on May 10, 1944.

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Your decision is happy news which delighted us. Putting an end to too long an oversight, it marks recognition of the decisive contribution of internationalist resistance fighters to the liberation of France and the re-establishment of the Republic. Manouchian and his comrades in fact belonged to the Francs-tireurs et partisans – Immigrant Labor force (FTP-MOI), a unit of the Communist Resistance composed largely of foreigners, refugees and immigrants. “Twenty-three strangers and yet our brothers”recalled Louis Aragon by celebrating them in his poem “L’Affiche rouge”, where he mentioned their names “difficult to pronounce”.

In our very uncertain times where new shadows win, where xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of rejection of the other, the foreigner and the different threaten, this patriotic and republican tribute is a message of fraternity which reminds that France has always been made of the world, of the diversity of its people and the plurality of its cultures thanks to the contribution of all its communities of foreign origin. Above all, it is a universal message which underlines how the ideals of equal rights, without distinction of birth, belief or appearance, initially proclaimed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, for which Manouchian and his comrades gave their lives, can lift the whole world.

Without forgetting a single one

Now, Mr. President, it is this message that the choice to include Missak and Mélinée Manouchian, and them alone, contradicts. They themselves would probably neither have understood nor wished for it. To isolate a single name is to break the fraternity of their militant collective. To single out a single community is to hurt the internationalism that animated them. This group of communist resistance fighters is not limited to Manouchian who, certainly, was its military leader before German propaganda promoted him to the leader of a criminal gang. And the symbol that he rightly represents for our compatriots in the Armenian community is inseparable from all the other nationalities and communities who shared his fight and his sacrifice.

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