Emmanuel Macron’s tears during the last tribute to the Companion of the Liberation

Emmanuel Macron wiped away a few tears listening to the choir who sang The Partisans’ Song, Thursday, November 11, in tribute to the resistant Hubert Germain at Mont-Valérien (Hauts-de-Seine). The president then gathered alone in the crypt of the memorial of combatant France, in front of the coffin of the last Companion of the Liberation. He then placed a cross of Lorraine cut in the wood of the framework of Notre-Dame, as the resistance fighter had wished.

“Mour father had great admiration for the president [Emmanuel Macron] and I think it was mutual “, commented Patrick Germain, the resistant’s son, after the ceremony. “I had the opportunity to meet the president during the ceremonies at the Invalides and I knew the very deep bonds which united the president to my father”.

>> Death of Hubert Germain: who was this Companion of the Liberation to whom homage is paid at Mont-Valérien?

In June 1960, by inaugurating this memorial, Charles de Gaulle had expressed the wish that the vault number 9 of the crypt be reserved for the last of the members of the Order of the Liberation, which he had created for “to reward the persons or the military and civil communities which will have distinguished themselves in the work of liberation of France and its empire”. Hubert Germain rests there among 16 other fighters of the Second World War.

After a tribute on the Champs-Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, in the morning, Hubert Germain’s coffin had arrived at Mont-Valérien by the French flag and transported by an AMX 10 tank, the same type of armored vehicle as the one used during the funeral of General de Gaulle in 1970. A Marseillaise had greeted the arrival of the coffin in the place of memory, the main place of execution of resistance fighters during the Second World War.