PARIS — Through the voice of French President Emmanuel Macron, France honors Missak Manouchian, a great figure of the French Resistance, hero of a singular story of a stateless Armenian poet who fought against the German occupiers on French soil. It would take several columns to write the story of this committed man who, with his comrades, carried out over 90 attacks and acts of sabotage, killing 150 Germans and wounding 600 more. The Nazis called it the Army of Crime.
On February 21, the 80th anniversary of Manouchian’s execution by the Nazis in 1944, France admitted the glorious resistance fighter to the prestigious Panthéon mausoleum, home to the greatest figures in the land of human rights.
Manouchian was born on September 1, 1906 in Adiyaman in the Ottoman Empire. Self-taught, he worked as a laborer, then became a carpenter. He fled to France in 1925.
He was a member of the Spanish Republican Aid Committee and a delegate for the French Communist Party until 1939, when he applied for French nationality. He was twice refused. It was as a foreigner that he was welcomed at the Panthéon.
Through him, we also pay tribute to his 21 other comrades, “Francs-tireurs [free shooters] and partisans,” who were shot alongside him. They were “Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Spaniards, Romanians or French.”
Panthéon
