The pantheonization of Missak Manouchian, which Emmanuel Macron could announce on Sunday, should symbolically mark the “recognition” of an unknown part of the Resistance, rejoice historians and descendants of the communist militants of the group which bore his name.
“Missak Manouchian’s entry into the Pantheon is also that of all those anonymous foreigners who died for France,” said Katia Guiragossian, grand-niece of the Armenian resistance fighter and his wife Mélinée, who survived him after he died. he was shot by the Germans on February 21, 1944 at Mont-Valérien.
For the historian Denis Peschanski, author of the book “Foreigners in the Resistance” (ed. de l’Atelier) and scientific manager of the Missak Manouchian committee at the Pantheon, the latter embodies a “memory convergence” as a “resistant, communist , survivor of the Armenian genocide, man of culture and lover of France’s human rights”.
Born in 1906 in Adiyaman in what is now Turkey, Missak Manouchian was orphaned at an early age, after the death of his father, killed during the Armenian genocide of 2015, then of his mother, carried away by famine.
Hidden by a Kurdish family, he was taken in with his older brother in an orphanage in Joubieh (now Lebanon), where he discovered a taste for writing and learned the trade of carpenter.
In 1925, aboard the boat taking the Manouchian brothers to Marseilles, Missak pours out a long poem on the hopes and dreams inspired by his future land of welcome.
“Many Armenians who landed in France at that time had an extremely positive image of the country, they had a real admiration for it,” recalls Astrig Atamian, historian of the Armenian communist movement in France.
If Missak Manouchian works for a time as a carpenter in Marseilles, he does not appreciate this work and goes up with his brother to Paris, where he is hired as a turner at the Citroën factory.
From crisis – personal, with the death of her brother from illness – to crisis – economic, with the loss of her job during the Great Depression -, Missak Manouchian exercises “a thousand professions” while continuing to explore her artistic fiber.
“He was also interested in music, in history, he took classes at the workers’ library, frequented the Sainte-Geneviève library, wrote poems… He even took scriptwriting classes!” , says Katia Guiragossian.
In 1934, the young man joined the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Relief Committee for Armenia, where he met Mélinée, also an orphan survivor of the Armenian genocide. Linked by their love of words, the son of a peasant and the daughter of a civil servant share the same political convictions, about to be put to the test.
After the start of the war, in 1939, Missak Manouchian was interned as a foreign communist in a camp and then incorporated into the army. On his return to occupied Paris in 1940, he continued his militant activity clandestinely, distributing anti-Hitler leaflets with his friend Arsène Tchakarian.
In early 1943, Missak Manouchian joined the armed communist resistance group, the Francs-tireurs et partisans – immigrant labor (FTP-MOI), “virtually the only ones at the time to lead the armed struggle in the Paris region, because all the groups had fallen one after the other”, specifies Denis Peschanski.
Operating under registration numbers and false names, the sixty FTP-MOI, Poles, Italians or Armenians, led from the summer of 1943 by Missak Manouchian, carried out around a hundred actions against the occupier: sabotage, derailments, attacks soldiers…
Until their greatest feat of arms, on September 28, 1943, the execution, rue Pétrarque in Paris, of SS General Julius Ritter, head of the Compulsory Labor Service (STO).
But the net of the special brigades of the police headquarters on the FTP-MOI is tightening.
On the morning of November 16, 1943, Missak Manouchian had to find the head of the FTP-MOI in the Paris region, Joseph Epstein, at the Evry-Petit-Bourg station. If the two men have a habit of meeting every Tuesday to discuss their actions, this meeting is singular.
“They had learned that the special brigades were on their trail and they had to establish the procedure for evacuating the whole group to the provinces,” says Joseph Epstein’s son, Georges Duffau-Epstein.
Arrested and then tortured, the two men were imprisoned separately for several months before their execution.
After a mock trial reported in the collaborationist press, Missak Manouchian was shot on February 21, 1944 at the age of 37 with about twenty of his comrades.
Ten of them appeared on the “Red Poster” posted in the streets by the German occupier, who presented them as “the army of crime” led by the “gang leader” Manouchian and attributed to them “56 attacks, 150 dead, 600 injured.
“The Red Poster wanted to make them assassins, but made them heroes”, underlines Denis Peschanski.
Louis Aragon will pay tribute in 1955 to these “twenty-three foreigners and our brothers yet” in his poem “Stanzas to remember”, taken up in song by Léo Ferré.
If “the Red Poster” has “entered Missak and his comrades into legend”, it nevertheless does not sum up his entire journey, judges his little niece Katia Guiragossian. She believes that “Manouche”, as his family affectionately nicknames him, embodies, through his fight and his personality, a “hyphen”.
His pantheonization concretizes his own prediction: the “French people and all freedom fighters will be able to honor our memory with dignity,” Missak wrote in his last letter to his wife Mélinée.
06/16/2023 19:14:05 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
