Emmanuel Macron will preside over a ceremony in tribute to the French Resistance and Jean Moulin on Monday in Lyon, as the 80th anniversary of his arrest and death approaches, the Élysée announced on Thursday. The ceremony will take place at 3:00 p.m. at the Montluc Prison Memorial, place of detention of Jean Moulin and many other resistance fighters, and Jews, under the Occupation.
The Head of State will pay tribute to the internees, against a backdrop of Marseillaise and the Chant des Partisans, and will visit the cells of Jean Moulin and Marc Bloch, historian and other eminent member of the Resistance. Prefect from 1937 to 1940, first president of the National Council of Resistance (CNR), Jean Moulin was arrested by the Gestapo on June 21, 1943 in Caluire (Rhône) near Lyon by the local head of the Gestapo, Klaus Barbie. Horribly tortured, he remained silent and died of the injuries inflicted on July 8, 1943 at Metz station on the train taking him to Germany.
Emmanuel Macron will also visit the cell of Klaus Barbie, tried in 1987 in Lyon for crimes against humanity, before delivering a speech in “tribute to the French Resistance and to the victims of Nazi barbarism”.
Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon”, spent a night in Montluc after his arrest in 1983. He was sentenced on July 4, 1987 to life imprisonment and died in prison four years later. In 1995, Jacques Chirac acknowledged France’s responsibility in the Vel d’Hiv roundup, the largest wave of Jewish arrests in France.
The Montluc prison is “emblematic by the number and influence of the figures who were detained there, heroes of the Resistance like Jean Moulin or Raymond Aubrac, committed intellectuals like Marc Bloch, or hostages and innocent victims of Nazism like the children of Izieu,” recalls the Elysée. The 44 Jewish children, refugees in the colony of the house of Izieu (Ain), were rounded up on April 6, 1944 on the orders of the Gestapo, deported and murdered in the Nazi extermination camps.
The Head of State will be accompanied by the Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, the Minister of National Education Pap Ndiaye and the Secretary of State for Veterans and Memory, Patricia Miralles.
He will preside before at 11 a.m. the traditional ceremony commemorating the Victory of May 8, 1945 over Nazi Germany at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.