“The question is why he didn’t enter sooner?”, asks singer Arthur Teboul alongside instrumentalist Sébastien Wolf regarding the induction into the Pantheon, Wednesday February 21, of Missak Manouchian. “Sometimes songs choose us”: Fire! Chatterton, a literate rock group, has been performing L’Affiche rouge in concert since the end of 2021, a song by Léo Ferré celebrating the resistance hero shot 80 years ago.
The Élysée announces the entry into the Pantheon of Missak Manouchian, figure of the Resistance
Arthur Teboul and Sébastien Wolf are at the origin of a suspended moment, recently in the musical TV show Taratata. When they play L’Affiche rouge, the audience expects a wild sequence. “We didn’t say anything. We did it during the soundchecks (rehearsals) and, there, Nagui no longer moved, then he said: “you’re doing it tonight!”,” recalls Sébastien Wolf, alone at the keyboard for a weightless sound layer. “In concert, there’s silence and, at the end, people are talking to us about what? From this song. But it’s the song that is strong, we are only smugglers,” describes Arthur Teboul. We can capture the emotion of the audience, as the title lands during the encores, in the album Live in Paris recorded in April 2022 at the Zénith.
“Arthur had been humming it for a long time in the dressing rooms and, one day, we said to each other: “go ahead, we’ll play it tonight!””, rewinds Sébastien Wolf. “It seemed obvious: it was in the fall of 2021, right during the rise of Éric Zemmour during the presidential campaign,” deciphers the multi-instrumentalist. “There was a sort of correspondence with this song in our set and the political period.” The musician hopes to make people think, in an audience “of all political stripes”. “Those who made bad choices, because of the crisis, because of fear, perhaps they will understand that it is not the foreigner who is the problem.”
Survivor of the Armenian genocide, stateless, refugee in France, Missak Manouchian joined the communist resistance (Francs-tireurs et partisans – Immigrant workforce/FTP-MOI), among which he distinguished himself at the head of a very active. Arrested, he 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 the Red Poster put up in the streets by the occupier, which presented them as “the army of crime”.
Louis Aragon paid tribute in 1955 to these “twenty-three foreigners and our brothers nevertheless” in his poem Strophes pour memorandum, inspired by the last letter that Missak Manouchian addressed to his wife Mélinée (who survived him by 45 years and also entered at the Pantheon). A poem taken up in song in 1961 by Léo Ferré. A limited edition vinyl, with Missak Manouchian on the cover, will be released on Friday with versions by Léo Ferré and Feu! Chatterton.
“In the group, several of us have grandparents who experienced the war in the resistance or were deported. It resonates enormously with us but it resonates even more with current events,” continues Sébastien Wolf. And to underline the “need to remember what happened not so long ago in France”. The words posed by Aragon date back almost 70 years. “It may seem far away but we realize to what extent these words have an acuity that freaks you out,” says Arthur Teboul.
“It doesn’t take much, a little comfort, a bit of cowardice, to let things take hold – hatred of foreigners – and we are trapped, it’s too late,” summarizes the singer. “We are singers, we can only awaken a feeling, speak on a human level, say how you find your equal in others,” he concludes.
