“I love Paris in the month of May,” sang Charles Aznavour in 1956. Sixty-eight years later, in this month of May, Paris honors his memory with a plaque inaugurated at 22, rue de Navarin. His parents Misha and Knar regularly lived at this address near Pigalle during the Second World War. And it is in honor of his hundredth birthday on May 22 that the town hall of the 9th arrondissement initiated this ceremony Thursday morning.
About a hundred people were gathered. At the windows, a few curious neighbors listen to the speeches and tributes given by five students from Condorcet college. They tell the life of the man who proclaimed himself “one hundred percent French, one hundred percent Armenian”, recalls the Ambassador of Armenia to France, Hasmik Tolmajian. The children do not forget to mention his love for the capital and his adoration for love itself, about which he wrote many songs.
At the age of thirteen, Plume Koretzky performed La Bohème in front of an attentive audience. The student from the Rock School in Paris, supported by his father whose tear of emotion flowed. “It’s an honor,” he confides. The young girl with curly hair was accompanied on the piano by her friend Alice Cleret de Langavant, together they covered this 1965 title.
Then the speeches flowed. The memory of the “precursor”, the “ambassador of French song”, or even the “voice of the Armenian diaspora” was revived and the importance of this Parisian address underlined. This apartment was a place of “refuge” and “solidarity”. The Aznavour family clandestinely hosted the resistance fighters Mélinée and Missak Manouchian who entered the Pantheon on February 21, 2024, but also numerous Jewish refugees and Russian and Armenian deserters. Now, this period will be marked with this plaque, which for the moment has not yet been attached to the wall.