Dozens of people gathered Tuesday evening at Mont-Valérien, near Paris, for a tribute to resistance fighter Missak Manouchian and her French and foreign companions, on the very scene of their shooting by the German occupier 80 years earlier.
This vigil was attended by several members of the government, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, communist political leaders as well as families of resistance fighters.
This ceremony, organized by the State Secretariat for Veterans, takes place on the eve of Manouchian's entry into the Pantheon on Wednesday.
He will be accompanied by his wife, also a resistance fighter and who died in 1989, with whom he remains united in death even if she is not herself pantheonized.
Will also enter symbolically, with an inscription of their name, his
Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Romanian or French
“comrades in combat and resistance” , some Jews.
The same path as those shot on February 21, 1944
The coffin of Missak Manouchian, accompanied by photos of all the members of her group of foreign resistance fighters of the Francs-tireurs et partisans - immigrant labor force (FTP-MOI), was to take on Tuesday the same path as those shot on February 21, 1944 That day, Manouchian, a stateless communist, and 22 of his comrades in arms were executed by the Germans in a clearing on Mont-Valérien, in the western suburbs of Paris.
Arrested the same day as Manouchian, Joseph Epstein, the leader of all the FTPs in the Paris region, was also shot two months later.
After a moment of contemplation in the clearing of those who were shot, the coffin was to be exhibited in the evening on the esplanade of the Combatant France Memorial, where it will be solemnly vigiled.
The coffin will then be transferred to the Memorial crypt where it will rest overnight.
A call from members of his group and a reading of Manouchian's last letter to his wife, Mélinée, is also planned.
Read also Pantheonization of Manouchian: “When the wheat is under the hail, a fool who acts delicately”
Missak Manouchian took refuge in France in 1925 after surviving the massacres by the Ottoman Empire of 1.2 to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-1916, which are recognized as genocide by many historians and around thirty country but not by Turkey.
A worker and poet, he joined the communist resistance in 1943 where he distinguished himself at the head of a very active network before being arrested.
The Manouchian group notably organized the assassination of German SS officer Julius Ritter, head of the Compulsory Labor Service (STO) on rue Pétrarque in Paris.
Other entry ceremonies into the Pantheon have in the past been preceded by a vigil, notably for Jean Moulin, at the memorial of the martyrs of the deportation, or even Maurice Genevoix, in Les Éparges then at the École normale supérieure in rue from Ulm.