“You enter here as a soldier with your comrades”: Missak Manouchian rests in the Pantheon

2024-02-22 10:01:18

An echo of these “French people of preference” celebrated by Louis Aragon in his poem on those of the Red Poster, of which Manouchian was the central figure. He is the first communist and the first foreigner – he died stateless – to enter the Pantheon. In vault 13 of the crypt where he now rests with his wife, she below, he above, his neighbors are Joséphine Baker and Maurice Genevoix. And symbolically, his brothers in arms, executed on the same day as their leader at Mont-Valérien. Joseph Epstein, alias Colonel Gilles, the general manager of the network, arrested with Manouchian, will be shot on April 11 in the same clearing. Golda Bancic, a Jew of Romanian origin, is the only one to have escaped the peloton. Because this was the fate that Nazi law reserved for women, she was beheaded a little later in a German prison.