Denis Peschanski is an emeritus director of research at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a historian specializing in WWII and memorial science. He wrote several books on the French Resistance, and notably on foreign-national Resistance fighters. The latest, co-written with Claire Mouradian and Astrig Atamian, is devoted to the eponymous Manouchian. He was the historical adviser on the graphic novel Missak Manouchian. Une Vie Héroïque ("Missak Manouchian. A Heroic Life") and co-author of Hugues Nancy's televised documentary Manouchian et Ceux de l'Affiche Rouge ("Manouchian and those from the Red Poster").

Missak Manouchian's "Panthéonization" has been proposed several times, most notably when President François Hollande inducted four Resistance fighters – Pierre Brossolette, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion and Jean Zay – into the Panthéon in May 2015: A group without a single Communist or foreign-national Resistance fighter. Why not choose Missak Manouchian or Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a Communist leader and Resistance fighter who was deported, and who was close to Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz? Subsequently, in late 2021, a committee for Manouchian's Panthéonization was organized by Pierre Sakoun, the president of Unité Laïque (a secular association). This committee gradually expanded, and I became its historical adviser. On March 30, 2022, the committee was received by the office of the president of the French Republic, and Emmanuel Macron's approval was all but assured. The official announcement was made on June 18, 2023.

The committee's approach was based on a universalist perspective, as opposed to the prison of identitarianism. With Missak Manouchian and Mélinée, it is the "23" resistance fighters of the so-called Affiche Rouge ("Red Poster") trial and every foreign-national resistance fighter who is being inducted into the Panthéon. Among those sentenced as part of the "army of crime" – as German propaganda called them – were Polish Jews, many Jews in general, Italians, Armenians, a Spaniard, and so on. All of them had multiple identities.

Manouchian was an orphan of the 1915 [Armenian] genocide. He joined the Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party) in 1934 and played an important role in the Armenian immigration movement. He was a communist, an Armenian, an internationalist, but at the same time – as evidenced by archival documents discovered in the summer of 2023 – he wanted to become French and submitted two applications for naturalization in 1933 and 1940. Both were unsuccessful.

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