Arthur Teboul from the group Feu! Chatterton, looks back on their cover of “L’Affiche rouge” for Missak Manouchian’s entry into the Pantheon

The song was a moment of grace in front of the coffins of the Manouchian couple covered with a French flag. After this ceremony presided over by Emmanuel Macron, several members of the public spoke of their great emotion.

A survivor of the Armenian genocide, stateless, and a refugee in France, Missak Manouchian joined the communist resistance, within which he distinguished himself at the head of a very active network:Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Spaniards, Romanians and French fighting together. Arrested, Missak Manouchian was shot by the Germans at the age of 37, on February 21, 1944, with around twenty of his comrades. Ten of them appeared on this now famous “Red Poster” posted in the streets by the occupier, it presented them as “the army of crime”.

The song lRed poster, Fire! Chatterton has been performing it since late 2021.It’s a song that we’ve been singing for several years and that moves us every night. Because Aragon’s words, which themselves take up the words of Missak Manouchian’s letter to his partner before he died, are a message, a lesson in humanity: how to be noble of heart in all circumstances? How to remain upright, heroic, but heroic with integrity” explains Arthur Teboul. MBut performing this song at the Pantheon, its resonance still remains special six months later. “That day, when the song is sung on the steps of the Pantheon, the symbolism is there: it is the 80th anniversary of the death of those shot in L’Affiche rouge, foreigners who saved France.“, says Arthur Teboul.

“There were many foreigners who fought for a republican and democratic ideal, an ideal of fraternity that we tend to forget.”

Arthur Teboul

on franceinfo

“This song, in these particular times, resonates strongly. It is also one of the reasons why this moment touched so many people in France. If we had sung this song 20 years ago, perhaps we would have been less sensitive to these words of fraternity, of hope, continues Arthur Teboul. These foreigners didn’t even have a French passport. Manouchian was repeatedly refused French nationality. They fought for an ideal. And then saying goodbye to Missak Manouchian and his wife Mélinée, in front of their coffin. It’s probably the most pressure-filled moment of our entire short career with Feu! Chatterton“.

Arthur Teboul confides that it was only the next day and the day after, when he began to see people’s reactions, the messages that were sent to him, that he realized “that something special had happened“. And months later, we still talk to him about that moment.”It’s a turning point for us as a band, as an artist. There’s a before and an after, he says. Almost every day, people come to talk to me about that moment: associations, political parties…“

At the time of the Pantheonization, he was in the process of finishing The Addresshis second book, with “the small team at Seghers and in particular the artistic director who takes care of all the graphic design, who is of Armenian origin“. “I learned from him that Armenians in France, and perhaps elsewhere too, had been very touched by this moment. And, because of my resemblance, a little, to Manouchian, with this moustache and my big nose, he smiled, They wanted me to be Armenian, which touched me a lot. That’s also why we were honored to play as a group and sing that day.” A vinyl with Missak Manouchian on the cover, with versions by Léo Ferré and Feu! Chatterton was released two days after the ceremony at the Panthéon.