Emmanuel Macron paid tribute on Wednesday April 6 to Jean Isaac-Tresca, the last of the resistance fighters who fought in the Glières maquis, in the Alps, during the Second World War, who recently died at 104 years old.
“
Live free or die, that was the motto of the resistance fighters of the Glières maquis.
Jean Isaac-Tresca was the last of them
”, reacted the head of state, in a press release from the Elysée.
“
He said no to the occupier, yes to the honor of France.
His legacy will live.
Always, we will rekindle the flame of the Resistance
,” he added.
Read also“Assa Traoré at the Glières Plateau: an insult to resistant France”
Jean Isaac-Tresca, born in 1918 in Lyon, had fought on this remote plateau, located in the Bornes massif at 1450 meters above sea level, which had become a symbolic high place of the Resistance.
He was one of the 460 men - soldiers from the 27th battalion of Alpine hunters from Annecy, men from the Secret Army, resisters of the STO, communists, snipers and partisans or Spanish republicans - to settle there in the winter. 1944, recalls the Élysée.
129 of them perished
"
Under the pseudonym of Pasquier, Jean Isaac-Tresca no longer acts as a shadow, in the anonymity of nocturnal sabotage and guerrilla warfare, but with an open face, in the frontality of the fighting
", adds the presidency in its press release.
"
But the victories of the maquis irritated the Occupation
", who "
dispatched a whole division of the Wehrmacht, supported by the Luftwaffe, the heavy artillery and the French Militia
" from March 23, 1944. "
Faced with an enemy ten times more numerous
", the resistance fighters "
fought valiantly until March 26
" when, surrounded, they "
sounded the withdrawal and separated to better slip through the narrow meshes of the enemy net
".
129 of them perished while others were captured, tortured, deported.
Read also79 years later, "
the homeland does not forget
" its resistance fighters
After the war, Jean Isaac-Tresca became an engineer and lived for a long time in Japan.
On March 31, 2019, Emmanuel Macron commemorated, with former President Nicolas Sarkozy, the 75th anniversary of the fighting on the Glières plateau at the national cemetery of Morette, in Thônes (Haute-Savoie).
