Politics of memory: Missak Manouchian: Rest in the Panthéon

I joined the Liberation Army as a volunteer soldier and am dying just a few centimeters away from victory and the goal. Happiness for those who survive and experience the freedom and peace of tomorrow.” These sentences come from a letter that the Armenian Resistance fighter Missak Manouchian (1906–1944) wrote to his wife Mélinée on the day of his execution. He then continued: “I am sure that the French people and all those who fight for freedom will know how to honor our memory with dignity.”

On February 21, 1944, Manouchian was executed along with 25 other resistance fighters on Mont-Valérien. Among the dead were 22 members of a partisan network led by Manouchian and three Breton high school students who had been convicted of guerrilla activity. Mont-Valérien is a fortress on a hill of 160 meters twelve kilometers west of Paris. The fortress served as a base for the French army during the siege of Paris in 1870/71. From 1941 to 1944, the German occupying forces used the fortress as an execution site. Over 1,000 people were shot there.

The Armenian Post had already immortalized Missak Manouchian on a special stamp on May 26, 2015: standing in a military coat with the Arc de Triomphe and a red propaganda poster in the background. Exactly 80 years to the day after his execution, La Poste is commemorating the survivor of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915/16, who fled to France and died there, with four stamps on a collector’s receipt that will be released on the market today, February 21st fought the German occupiers.

A year earlier, Missak Manouchian received the greatest honor that deceased personalities can receive in France: the urns containing his ashes and those of his wife Mélinée were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. Manouchian is the first communist and migrant resistance fighter there. Historians see this as an overdue recognition of the role of communist and foreign partisans in the Resistance.

The respective French president decides who will be honored in this way. Among others, the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, the writers Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, the scientists Marie and Pierre Curie and the politicians Jean Jaurès and Simone Veil rest in the Panthéon on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. All embody French culture and identity. “With Manouchian, all Armenians, Italians, Spaniards and Central European Jews who gave their lives for liberation are moving to the Panthéon,” said the French historian Denis Peschanski.

Who was this Missak Manouchian? Born in 1906 in the city of Adiyaman in the southeast of what is now Turkey, he experienced the genocide of his people as a child. He was nine years old when his parents died in the massacres. He was able to flee to Syria with his brother, where they both lived in an orphanage for a few years. In Lebanon, Missak met his future wife Mélinée. In 1925 they set off together across the Mediterranean to visit relatives in France. Missak Manouchian found a job at the automobile manufacturer Citroën. Initially he became involved on a cultural level. When he arrived in France, he had little luggage with him other than a few booklets of poems. At the beginning of the 1930s he and friends published two literary magazines one after the other.

In 1934 he joined the French Communist Party. He remained deeply committed to the fate of his homeland and was involved in the Aid Committee for Armenia. During the Spanish Civil War he was also a member of the Relief Committee for the Defenders of the Spanish Republic. As a member of a group of Armenian communists, he worked as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Zangou and, from 1938 to 1939, as secretary of the Armenian People’s Union, a collective movement for left-wing Armenians. After the German occupation of France, Manouchian became military leader of the immigrant group of the Paris district communist partisan organization FTP/MOI. He took part in the military struggle without reservation. His group carried out numerous attacks against the German occupying forces.

In November 1943 Manouchian was arrested. His group was accused of 56 attacks. In a spectacular trial he was sentenced to death before a German court martial in February 1944. As a deterrent, the German occupiers and the collaborationist regime in Vichy in southern France had thousands of blood-red propaganda posters with portraits of the arrested and executed Resistance fighters hung up.

What was intended as a threat, however, spurred the fight for freedom by the French and their allies all the more. Louis Aragon wrote a poem entitled “L’Affiche rouge” (Red Poster) honoring the resistance group. Léo Ferré set the poem to music as a chanson. Manouchian entered the collective memory of the French 60 years ago through poetry and melody, says historian Denis Peschanski. And that is even more significant than the entry of his remains into the Panthéon.