Missak Manouchian was born a survivor.
His existence was framed by drama.
Both of his parents died during the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks: his father during combat, his mother, from hunger and fatigue.
He was shot on February 21, 1944 by the Germans
“while looking at the sun and the beautiful nature that (he) loved so much”
.
In the poignant letter that this madman for poetry had left for his wife, Mélinée, who survived him and entered the Pantheon with him, Manouchian expressed a certainty:
“I am sure that the French people and all the Freedom fighters will know honor our memory with dignity.
»
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This will be done on Wednesday afternoon.
His ashes will be transferred to the mausoleum, during a ceremony that will be broadcast by France 2, precisely eighty years after the execution of the group of Francs-tireurs et partisans de la workforce immigrant (FTP-MOI) in Mount Valérien.
Before that, Tuesday evening, the channel is programming a documentary entitled
Manouchian and those of the Red Poster
.
Read also Pantheonization of Missak Manouchian: the “Red Poster” at the heart of his memory
The story of a trajectory marked by love of France (which refused him two requests for naturalization), the turmoil of the working class, faith in the USSR, the anti-fascist and anti-Nazi struggle.
The film does not forget Manouchian's comrades, like him foreigners and communists, many of them Jewish, whose valor was equal to his own.
They will not enter the Pantheon with him, but a commemorative plaque will celebrate their memory there.
Challenging clandestinity
After fleeing the Armenian genocide, Missak Manouchian was welcomed into an orphanage in Lebanon.
His taste for France was born there.
He went to meet him in 1923 to increase the workforce of the Marseille shipyards.
He then discovered Paris and the companionship at the foot of the machines.
He joined the Communist Party, where he met Jews who had fled anti-Semitic Poland, Spaniards who had left Franco, Italians opposed to Mussolini... In the voice-over, Arthur Teboul, singer of the group Feu Chatterton!
attached to the figure of Manouchian, puts all his sincerity.
For Missak, the baptism of fire took place on March 17, 1943, in Levallois: a grenade thrown at a German detachment.
When he took charge of FTP-MOI in August of the same year, 65 fighters made up the network.
Until November, they will carry out around sixty operations.
For the PC to which they were attached, it was a question of psychologically weakening the enemy.
And to impose itself between the different movements of the Resistance.
Another documentary,
Les Résistants de l'Affiche rouge
, broadcast on Tout l'Histoire on Wednesday at 10:30 p.m., is full of details and clearly traces their life of combat.
The PC orders them to speed up their actions.
Nervous, living a trying clandestine life, they are spotted by the formidable French police services.
Should they be thrown into inevitably dangerous operations as the Party did?
We imagine the answer is not easy to give.
The police put their hands on Manouchian and his comrades.
The Nazis display their faces on posters that they wanted to be red like shame.
Their humiliation will be their posterity.
Aragon, who published Stanzas pour le souvenir
in 1955
, helped build their memory.
His poem enters every home with the music of Léo Ferré.
Manouchian, who had
“claimed neither glory nor tears”
according to the poet who never repented of his Soviet faith, had built a first tomb between these lines.