The first terrorism memorial museum should be inaugurated in 2027 in Paris and will highlight France's capacity for "resilience and resistance" in the face of the attacks, AFP learned Tuesday from the project manager, historian Henry Rousso.
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"We design the memorial and the museum together, therefore as a place which has this double vocation, to link the function of transmission and homage, to hold together a function of emotion and reflection
", explains the historian, chosen in 2019 by then Prime Minister Édouard Philippe to lead the project.
The start of this unprecedented project in France was announced by President Emmanuel Macron in September 2018. A public interest group (GIP) notably made up of François Molins, the former Paris prosecutor at the time of the Bataclan attacks, by Françoise Rudetzki, founder of SOS Attentats or even Patrick Pelloux, emergency doctor and former employee of
Charlie Hebdo
met for the first time last Friday.
The precise location of the site must be stopped by 2022. But “it will necessarily be located in Paris or in Greater Paris” and will not be linked to a particular attack, Mr. Rousso told AFP.
The French project will cover all victims and acts of terrorists since 1974, the date of the Drugstore Publicis attack until today.
"It will also be a question of anarchist, nationalist, independentist Third Worldist and political attacks as well as recent jihadist attacks
,
"
explains Henry Rousso.
The museum part of the site will present
"the phenomenon of terrorism by making it possible to think about it, to understand it to avoid the effect of astonishment which an attack provokes each time"
, explains the historian, who wants it despite the heaviness of the theme
“Like a place open to the contemporary world”
.
The museum will also give an important place to victims, survivors, physical and mental injuries, first responders as well as front-line helpers.
The delicate question of the place to be given in the design of exhibitions to the perpetrators of the attacks is being
"under consideration"
, with the idea
"of excluding any form of heroisation"
, assures Henry Rousso.
The “memorial” part will allow “exhaustive registration” of the names of all French victims of terrorism, who died on national territory and abroad.
There are less than a dozen memorial museums around the world dedicated to the attacks, including the one in Oklahoma City (1995 attack) or even in Oslo (the Utoya massacre in 2011) and those in New York dedicated to attacks of September 11, 2001.
