Resistance fighter, foreigner, communist and poet, Missak Manouchian is preparing to enter the Pantheon. Through him, all those shot at Mont-Valérien on February 21, 1944 are being honored. The Head of State will have the delicate task of delivering a speech worthy of the man he will celebrate, but also of those who celebrated him before him. And builds his posterity. Without Aragon who praised him lyrically, would the Manouchian group climb the Sainte-Geneviève mountain today?
“If Manouchian enters the Pantheon today, he naturally owes it to his action, but also to this famous Red Poster which had the opposite effect to that expected by the Germans, and to the two great communist poets who encountered his own poetry” , estimates historian Denis Peschanski, member of the support committee for the initiative of this pantheonization and author of reference works on the subject.
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The action of the Francs-Tireurs and Partisans of the International Workers’ Movement (FTP – ME) did not of course wait for Louis Aragon to be celebrated. At the end of the war, France had not forgotten the audacity of this communist movement made up of foreigners, some formerly of the International Brigades, many Jewish. Their actions, notably the assassination of the colonel who supervised the Compulsory Labor Service (STO), had at least the consequence of psychologically weakening the enemy.
We also remembered the poster designed by the Germans after their arrest to turn the population against these resistance fighters stamped in black letters “Jews” or “communists”. “The filthy Jew,” wrote a collaborationist newspaper about one of them. Placed all over Paris, their shaggy faces must have frightened passers-by. The opposite happened. In February 1944, while the French continued to be sent to Germany as part of the STO, these faces aroused gratitude.
From 1950, the communist Paul Éluard devoted verses to the “Manouchian group” that remained in the shadow of those of Aragon. “These strangers here / Who chose fire / Their portraits on the walls / Are alive forever. / A sun of memory / Lights up their beauty (…) / When we no longer kill / They will be well avenged.” The poet, since the Spanish Civil War, had made it his mission to celebrate the forgotten and the oppressed. In Legion, he expresses his gratitude. “If I have the right to say in French today / My pain and my hope, my anger and my joy (…) / It is because foreigners as they are still called / Believed in justice here below and concrete.”
Denis Peschanski recalls that, until 1948-1949, “all memories were welcomed in France, among them those of foreign resistance fighters”. This will be less the case in the years that follow. The Cold War changed the situation. And the PCF, for its part, is forced to respect the line of an anti-Semitic and suspicious Stalin in the face of the former volunteers of the International Brigades. “I would put it this way: the death of Stalin in 1953 made the work of those who wanted, in any case, to pay homage to the FTP – ME easier,” summarizes Denis Peschanski.
Among these are resistance fighters, Claude and Raymond Lévy as well as Albert Ouzoulias, who became a municipal councilor in Paris. The latter knows he owes his life to one of the snipers. A small street in the 20th arrondissement was renamed Groupe-Manouchian on their proposal in 1954. In preparation for the inauguration, they knocked on the door of the intellectual and zealous champion of French communism, Aragon. Which then compose seven Stanzas to remember, lyrical, patriotic, flamboyant.
“You have not asked for glory nor tears / Neither the organ nor prayer to the dying / Eleven years already, eleven years fly by”, he wrote under the eyes of Elsa Triolet. Moved by this broken couple, he further paraphrases lines written by Manouchian to his wife Mélinée before being taken to Mont-Valérien: “Farewell life, farewell light and wind / Get married, be happy and think of me often / You who will remain in the beauty of things / When everything is finished later in Erivan.” Mélinée, who at that time was preparing the publication in Armenia of Missak’s poems, had entrusted the farewell letter to Aragon.
In 1959, the setting to music of Stanzas to remember by Léo Ferré, a great admirer of the poet, completed the construction of the legend. The anarchist first entrusted L’Affiche rouge to Monique Morelli, the one who first brought Aragon “to the streets” by singing her lyrics. His interpretation, less known, is no less poignant. Ferré then recorded it in 1961. Between the choruses and the timpani, his voice rises in the bass, almost trembling.
On Wednesday at dusk, L’Affiche rouge will resonate under the vault of the Parisian mausoleum. Would Adiyaman’s orphan have come to sleep next to Victor Hugo? Upon her arrival in the 1920s, Missak Manouchian spent hours reading French poetry in front of the Panthéon, at the Sainte-Geneviève library. The future resistance fighter was then, to quote one of his lines, an “adolescent drunk with a dream of books and paper.”
