A stateless Armenian poet who died fighting the Nazi occupation of France during World War II on Wednesday, February 21, became the first non-French Resistance fighter to enter the Panthéon mausoleum for national heroes.
The honor to Missak Manouchian has been seen as long-overdue recognition of the bravery of foreign communists – many Jewish – who fought the Nazis alongside members of the French Resistance.
Members of the French foreign legion carried the coffins of Manouchian and his wife Mélinée, also a member of the Resistance, draped in French flags into the secular temple. The names of 23 of his communist comrades-in-arm – including Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Romanian fighters – will be added to a commemorative plaque inside the monument.
"Grateful France welcomes you," President Emmanuel Macron said.
Manouchian arrived in France as a young man in the mid-1920s, after fleeing World War I-era mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a child to French-mandate Lebanon. He joined the Parti Communiste Français's armed resistance in 1943, soon leading dozens of foreigners fighting the German occupiers in the Paris region.
Under his watch, they carried out sabotage, derailed trains, attacked German soldiers and assassinated a German SS colonel in charge of the forced enlistment of French workers. Manouchian was arrested in November 1943 and tortured before being shot dead by firing squad aged 37 with around 20 of his comrades in February 1944.
After their death sentences, a Nazi propaganda poster showing images of 10 from the group on a red background, which became known as the Affiche Rouge ("Red Poster") sought to demonize them as members of a "criminal army." But it backfired and later inspired a poem by French poet Louis Aragon, a song and several films.
During Wednesday's ceremony, French singer Patrick Bruel read out the last letter Manouchian wrote to his wife before he was shot.
"My dear Mélinée, my beloved little orphan, in a few hours, I will no longer be," he had written.
Manouchian, who pursued poetry and literature while working in a shipyard and a factory before the war, had requested French nationality in 1933 and 1940, both times without success. He was one of many foreigners in the French Resistance.
They were mostly "anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, Spanish Republicans who had fled Francoism, anti-fascist Italians, Poles who had fled anti-Semitism, Armenians and Jews from eastern Europe and Germany," according to the French Defense Ministry.
It is unclear how many exactly of the 2.2 million foreigners in France at the time joined the Resistance. But of the 1,000 Resistance fighters executed by the Nazis at the Mont Valerien fort outside Paris during the occupation, 185 were foreign, historian Denis Peschanski told Agence France-Presse. That was a much higher proportion of foreigners than in the country's pre-war population of around 40 million.
Under Macron, three people have been awarded a place inside the Panthéon since 2017: writer Maurice Genevoix, women's rights icon Simone Veil and US-born entertainer and French Resistance member Josephine Baker. Baker, the first Black woman to receive the honor, had been awarded French nationality before the war.
Last year, Macron said Manouchian would also receive the honor, paying tribute to his "bravery" and "quiet heroism." At the time, Parliament was debating a contentious immigration bill that Macron eventually signed into law earlier this year.
The roughly 2,000 people invited to Wednesday's ceremony include Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and representatives of the Parti Communiste Français. Far-right former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said she would also be attending, sparking controversy. The parliamentary leader of the anti-immigration Rassemblement National party was invited, but Macron said this weekend that the far right should be "inspired not to be present."
Georges Duffau-Epstein, whose Jewish immigrant father Joseph Epstein was among those being honored, said Le Pen was "not welcome."