The procession of dark sedans stopped at the foot of Paris' Panthéon at dusk. On Thursday, December 7, President Emmanuel Macron, flanked by a squad of advisers, entered the crypt where 80 illustrious men and women whom the nation has chosen to honor were laid to rest. The discreet visit did not appear on Macron's official agenda. True to the tradition he has established since the start of his first term in office, the president wants to decide for himself where Missak Manouchian − a blue-collar communist, a poet, a survivor of the Armenian genocide and a figure of the French Resistance − will be installed. He and his wife, Mélinée, will enter the Panthéon on February 21, 80 years after his execution by the Germans. Macron had performed the same ritual before the "pantheonization" of writer Maurice Genevoix, in 2020, and that of the showgirl and Resistance fighter Joséphine Baker, a year later.
Accompanied by representatives of the Committee for Missak Manouchian's entry into the Panthéon, the head of state stopped in front of vault 13, the "Macron vault." On the left, Joséphine Baker. Under the plaque, where her name and date of entry into the necropolis are engraved, are two intertwined flowers, one white and one blue. In the background, Maurice Genevoix. Macron had not wanted the author of Ceux de 14 ("The men of 1914") to be installed with Zola, Hugo and Dumas, believing that these three major writers of the 19th century should not be joined by anyone else. "The only one who could lay claim to it would be Houellebecq," joked Elysée memorial adviser Bruno Roger-Petit, who worked for Manouchian, "a man of universalism" and "the choice of France."
Draped in a black coat, Macron continued his inspection. He passed the sixth vault, where Human rights activist and Health Minister Simone Veil was laid to rest in 2017, alongside Resistant Jean Moulin, writer André Malraux, jurist René Cassin and "father of Europe" Jean Monnet. He did not linger in front of the one where, in 1989, François Mitterrand placed three figures of the Revolution, Nicolas de Condorcet, Abbé Grégoire and Gaspard Monge. "The Freemasons' vault!" the president quipped, before moving on to the "[François] Hollande vault," where, since 2015, four members of the French Resistance have been laid to rest: Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion, Pierre Brossolette and Jean Zay. Under the vault, Macron noted the "unity of memory" of the site. "Adding Manouchian would be tantamount to giving him a folding seat at the back: no," he said.
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