Resistant and conservative, could Rose Valland in turn enter the Pantheon? A petition launched online on June 27 calls for it. Addressed to Emmanuel Macron, the text proposes to transfer the ashes of this “heroine of the resistance, too long ignored”, whose action during the Occupation and then at the Liberation “made it possible to save more than 60,000 looted works of art” . Died in 1980, Rose Valland rests today in her native village, in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, in Isère, alongside her friend.
“He is a person who embodies precisely this quiet heroism of which the President of the Republic spoke for Missak Manouchian”, explains Louis de Carbonnières, in reference to the Armenian resistance fighter whose Elysée announced the pantheonization last month. Professor of law at the University of Lille, the lawyer is at the initiative of the petition with his colleague Christelle Nicq, also from the University of Lille. Their initiative received the unanimous assent of the council of the faculty of legal, political and social sciences, as well as that of the undergraduate students, many of whom were piqued with a deep passion for Rose Valland, whose action they discovered in arriving in License.
“Rose Valland was a resistance member of great modesty and who, during the Occupation, constituted the evidence which later made it possible to restore the looted works, continues Louis de Carbonnières. She did her duty, then returned to her life. Rose Valland is a heroine of our time. She deserves to be honored”. The curator having been buried with her companion, her possible pantheonization could also constitute the entry of the first lesbian couple among the personalities celebrated by the institution – a detail on which the two jurists at the origin of the petition. “It seemed to us to be an element of his private life”, specifies Louis de Carbonnières, who specifies however that the couple should not actually be separated. With Christelle Nicq, he will now be responsible for setting up a scientific committee to support their campaign in favor of this “Cincinnatus of restitutions”.
Born in 1898, Rose Valland was a conservation assistant at the Jeu de Paume museum at the time of the Second World War. Under the Occupation, the establishment became the warehouse where the tens of thousands of works of art seized accumulated. Paintings, statues and other pieces of furniture piled up there before being resold or sent to Germany. In all discretion, she undertakes to keep a meticulous account of the goods that pass through the museum. At the liberation, the notebooks of this French-style “Monument Woman” made it possible to organize the tracking down and the restitution of a large part of the works.
“No one is suspicious of her”, says on June 29 at the microphone of France Inter, Jennifer Lesieur, who signed a biography devoted to the curator, published in May (Rose Valland, the spy at work, Robert Laffont ). She was an ideal spy. She even searched the trash cans to recover the carbon copies. She listened at the doors, trying to hide almost behind the curtains. A sign of the popularity of this historic figure in the art world, Rose Valland’s action during the war was the subject of an audio fiction broadcast in April on France Culture. The writing of this audio creation was supervised by historian Emmanuelle Polack, a specialist in the art market under the Occupation and works stolen during the Second World War.
The Élysée announced on June 18 that the ashes of the resistance fighter Missak Manouchian will enter the Panthéon in February 2024. A survivor of the Armenian genocide, the poet and stateless communist activist, of Armenian origin, organizes a Parisian Resistance network before d to be captured and then executed by being shot at Mont-Valérien in February 1944. The last personality to join the Pantheon was the singer and dancer Joséphine Baker, also a resistance fighter during the Occupation. She joined the setting of “the grateful homeland” in 2021.