The first of many times of memory. Emmanuel Macron celebrated on Sunday the 80th anniversary of the fighting on the Glières plateau, in the Alps, “burning center of the resistance” where around a hundred “martyrs” were killed in 1944.
The Head of State, who is beginning a long memorial cycle around the 80th anniversary of the Liberation, was to go to the Maison d'Izieu (Ain) in the afternoon. 44 Jewish children were rounded up there on April 6, 1944 by the Gestapo on the orders of Klaus Barbie, deported and murdered in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) and Reval (Estonia).
On the Glières plateau (Haute-Savoie), after reviewing the troops, Emmanuel Macron greeted the 105 resistance fighters buried at the national necropolis of Morette, in Thônes, these “heroes” who defended “9,000 ha of France free in the hollow of the peaks.
“At an altitude of 1,400 m, above itself, France rose. She lived as she should never have stopped living, as she should never have ceased to exist,” he added in the presence of three sections of Alpine hunters and nearly 600 children.
“French and foreigners united in the face of Nazism”
He also paid tribute to the diversity of the 465 resistance fighters who gathered from January to March 1944 on the plateau to receive airdrops of weapons from the Allies, in the run-up to the Landing of Provence (August 1944).
“Professors, peasants, notables, Jews as well as Catholics, communists, socialists or Gaullists, anarchists, French and foreign officers united in the same fight against Nazism,” he detailed, saluting the memory of Jean Isaac Tresca, last resistance fighter from Glières, died in 2022 at 104 years old.
At the end of March 1944, the German army and the French militia invaded the plateau. Two thirds of the resistance fighters were taken prisoner and 124 were killed during the fighting or shot, nine disappeared and 16 died in deportation.
“This is indeed our French tragedy that there were not the French on one side and the Nazis on the other (…) French people imprisoned French people, French people murdered French people,” recalled the head of state before children adorn the graves of the resistance fighters.
A call for an end to the invasion of Ukraine
Emmanuel Macron, who took a walkabout before leaving the scene, repeatedly recalled the motto of the Glières resistance fighters: “Live free or die”, alluding to the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “This war must stop,” he insisted.
The Head of State had already made the trip to Glières in the company of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, on March 31, 2019, for the 75th anniversary of the fighting.
Also read “No exploitation, but no evasion either”: commemorations against the backdrop of elections
In Izieu, Emmanuel Macron had to remind us that “the sole basis of anti-Semitism is hatred”, according to the Élysée. France has experienced a resurgence of anti-Semitism since the unprecedented attack by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the response by the Israeli army in Gaza.
Between May 1943 and April 1944, the Izieu colony, founded by Sabine Zlatin, a Jewish resistance fighter of Polish origin, and her husband Miron Zlatin, who had fled the Russian Revolution, took in around a hundred children, sometimes for a few weeks. .
More tributes in the coming weeks
On April 16, Emmanuel Macron will pay tribute to the Vercors maquis (Drôme), a first for an active president. This will then be followed by celebrations for the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, on June 6, at which American President Joe Biden is expected.
Then there will be a tribute to Georges Mandel, assassinated on July 7, 1944 in the forest of Fontainebleau, the 80th anniversary of the Landing of Provence and the liberation of Paris in August and finally that of Strasbourg in November.
Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has been making national tributes and historical references, more than his predecessors, with the possible exception of General de Gaulle. A way for him to invoke a Nation brought together in times of fractures, and to outline, implicitly, his own political project. After the “memorial wandering” around the First World War in 2018, the commemorations of the Liberation must constitute a highlight of its second five-year term, with the Paris Olympics.