Who are Mélinée and Missak Manouchian, figures of the Resistance, who will enter the Pantheon?

Eighty years after his death, this survivor of the Armenian genocide will be pantheonized. He will be accompanied by his wife Mélinée, also a resistance fighter in Paris during the Second World War.

After Simone Veil in 2018 and Joséphine Baker in 2021, the Pantheon will welcome two new heroes of the 20th century: resistance fighters Missak Manouchian and his wife Mélinée. The couple, survivors of the Armenian genocide, distinguished themselves by their armed struggle against the German occupation in the Paris region during the Second World War. Their pantheonization will take place on February 21, 2024, 80 years after the execution of the communist activist.

He emigrated to France in 1925

Born September 1, 1906 in Adiyaman, in the south of present-day Turkey, Missak Manouchian is the qfourth and last child of an Armenian peasant family. At the age of 9, he witnessed the massacres perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenian people. “He lost his family of which he was, with his brother Karapet, one of the only survivorswrites the Fusillés 1940-1944 website. These massacres had a profound impact on the young man, already brought up in the memory of previous massacres at the end of the 19th century.”

At the end of the war, he and his brother were taken care of by a French orphanage in Lebanon. Missak Manouchian “there is influenced by French culture. and attaches itself to “this country which appeared to him as protector and benefactor”. He emigrated to France in 1925, to Marseille precisely. He first worked at the shipyards of La Seyne-sur-Mer (Var), before being hired as a turner at Citroën in Paris.

In France, Missak Manouchian continues to practice her two passions: gymnastics and writing. In July 1930, he participated in the creation of a literary magazine in which he published translations of poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine and Victor Hugo. “He had developed a very strong attachment to France, human rights and the French Revolution”explained historian Denis Peschanski, specialist in the Second World War, in West France. He ended up getting involved in the French communist movement and became a member of the Communist International in 1935.

He created the Manouchian group

These are the values, “with exceptional mobilizing force”which explain “the commitment of these foreigners against Vichy and the Germans”, continues Denis Peschanski. In 1943, Missak Manouchian joined the Communist Resistance and formed the “Manouchian group”, one of the most active armed movements. AAround sixty men and women from the Francs-tireurs et partisans de la Main-d’œuvre immigrante (FTP-MOI) make up this group of foreign resistance fighters close to the French Communist Party.

“In 1943, in the Paris region, the repression carried out by the Germans and the special general intelligence brigades of the Paris police headquarters caused most of the armed groups of the Resistance to disappear, recalls historian Denis Peschanski. Except those of the FTP-MOI communists. In the historic capital of France, it was these foreigners who led the armed struggle against the Germans. Manouchian was the military commissioner of one of his groups.”

The Armenian appears with his comrades on the famous red German propaganda poster then plastered throughout occupied France. (bottom in the photo). The Red Poster is also the title of a film released in 1976, and directed by Franck Cassenti, which traces the history of the Manouchian group.

He was executed in February 1944.

After a long shadowing, Missak Manouchian was arrested on November 16, 1943 by the Germans in Evry-Petit Bourg (in Essonne). He is executed on February 21, 1944 with 21 other resistance fighters at Mont-Valérien (Hauts-de-Seine).

A few hours before his death sentence, he wrote a letter to his wife Mélinée from Fresnes prison. “My dear Mélinée, my beloved little orphan, in a few hours, I will no longer be in this world. (…) Happiness to those who will follow us and taste the sweetness of the freedom and peace of tomorrow. I am sure that the French people and all freedom fighters will honor our memory with dignity.”.

“I will die with 23 comrades later with the courage and serenity of a man who has a clear conscience, because personally, I did not harm anyone and, if I did, I I did it without hatred.”

Missak Manouchian

in a letter written to his wife Mélinée

She also got involved in the Resistance

As for Simone Veil and her husband Antoine, who entered the Pantheon in 2018, the family wanted the Manouchian couple to remain united in death, even if Mélinée will not herself be pantheonized in February 2024.

Born in 1913 in Constantinople (today Istanbul), Mélinée Manouchian was orphaned at the age of 3 after her parents were killed during the Armenian genocide. “She grew up from Greece to Paris, via Marseille, before obtaining her school certificate with honors, then training as an accounting secretary and shorthand typist”note West France.

It was in 1934 that she met Missak Manouchian, on the occasion of the annual celebration of the French section of the Relief Committee for Armenia (HOC). When the Second World War broke out, Mélinée Manouchian “for the role of typing leaflets and carrying secret messages. Two years later, they decided to move on to armed struggle and attackscontinues the regional daily. The young woman is assigned to spotting and spying on attack targets, then writing reports for the commandos.”

When her husband was arrested at the end of 1943, Mélinée Manouchian finds refuge with her friend Knar Aznavourian, the mother of singer Charles Aznavour. She only learned of her husband’s execution several weeks later. On December 31, 1986, François Mitterrand named her a knight of the Legion of Honor. She finally died on December 6, 1989 and was buried in the Parisian cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne). Her coffin will only be reunited with that of her husband five years later, in 1994, under the white stele of the soldiers who died for France.