Two hedges of umbrellas, bent by the gusts of wind and rain, tilt on either side of Rue Soufflot.
Missak and Mélinée Manouchian walk towards their final resting place, at the slow pace of the soldiers of the Foreign Legion.
Two sodden flags wrap their coffins, shrouds of a Republic that the resistance fighter of Armenian origin had adopted without ever having had the papers.
“French people of hope,” Emmanuel Macron paid tribute this Wednesday evening, in the speech which closed the ceremony, under the immense dome of the Pantheon.
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.
Only Golda Bancic, a Jew of Romanian origin, had escaped the peloton.
Because this was the fate that Nazi law reserved for women, she was beheaded a little later in a German prison.
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