France acknowledges the role of communist resistance in defeating fascism. On a Wednesday afternoon, the ashes of Missak Manouchian, an Armenian member of the French Communist Party who was executed by the Nazis in 1944, were laid to rest at the Panthéon in Paris. This marks the first time a figure from the leftmost, universalist wing of the resistance has been interred in the monument dedicated to France’s great nation builders.
Manouchian, buried alongside his wife, Mélinée, belonged to a unit of communist workers and immigrants. Most of its members were detained in late 1943 in the French capital and executed by occupying forces. The Spaniard Celestino Alfonso also belonged to the same group. His name is inscribed on a commemorative plaque honoring those 24 martyrs, making him the first Spanish national to be honored at the Panthéon.
This ceremony represented a recognition of the FTP-MOI and all those Jews, Hungarians, Poles, Armenians, and communists who gave their lives for the country, according to Emmanuel Macron, the French president, in an interview published in the left-leaning newspaper L’Humanité on Monday. Up to now, France had only panthéonized Gaullist resistance figures such as Jean Moulin and Geneviève de Gaulle. “Driven by a grand dream of liberty, Missak Manouchian took every risk,” Macron stated, speaking at a ceremony that honored the 24 members whose names had long been forgotten.
Controversial presence of Le Pen
During the ceremony, Armenian music was performed and Manouchian’s farewell letter to his wife was read aloud. In the letter he wished happiness to those who would outlive them and to those who would enjoy freedom and peace. In addition to descendants of these antifascist fighters, the event welcomed the Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Spain’s Minister of Territorial Policy and Historical Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, among other figures. The gathering drew notable attention due to the controversial attendance of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whom the president had advised not to attend. It also highlighted a tension: honoring a stateless immigrant not long after the government enacted a stringent migration law.
The entry of Missak Manouchian into the Panthéon occurred on the 80th anniversary of his execution, alongside 21 other members of his group, at the Fort de Mont-Valérien in the western suburbs of Paris. The “Manouchian Group” became famous for a 1944 red poster that accused these resistance fighters of being “the army of crime.” A decade later, that poster inspired Louis Aragon to write the poem L’affiche rouge, later adapted into a song by Jean Ferrat, further enlarging the legend of these resistance heroes.
Manouchian’s death at 37 prevented the militant, worker, and poet who was labeled a “stateless” person from witnessing Paris’s liberation six months later and the antifascist victory. Born in 1906 to a family of Armenian peasants in Anatolia, he lost his father and mother during the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire in 1905. During his adolescence in a Beirut orphanage, then under French influence, he discovered French culture. At about 18, he emigrated to Marseille and soon settled in Paris. There he worked as a carpenter, painter, and industrial laborer, and he also wrote poetry and translated French writers into Armenian.
After serving in the French Army against Nazi Germany in 1940, he joined the FTP-MOI movement, founded in 1942. Manouchian’s unit, roughly 65 fighters strong, carried out 229 attacks and other actions between July and November 1943. It stood at the forefront of a vanguard struggle that made life difficult for the Occupation authorities in occupied France. A historian noted that the French resistance was not a mass movement in the same way as in some other countries; the armed struggle was led primarily by the Communist Party in 1943 and 1944.
Symbolic entry of Spaniard Celestino Alfonso
Among those fighters, a significant number were Spanish Republicans. Celestino Alfonso was one of them. After emigrating to France in 1927, Alfonso fought in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades and was executed on February 21, 1944 at Mont Valérien. “Beyond family and close friends, few spoke of them,” remarked Christine Montiel, Celestino Alfonso’s great-niece, in statements to the press, including a major Catalan publication. The Panthéon recognition extends to all these combatants and serves as a broader tribute to their contribution.
With the Panthéon honors for Missak and Mélinée Manouchian and the symbolic welcome for their fellow fighters, the nation signals its gratitude to those foreigners who chose to struggle for a France free of oppression, according to the Defense Ministry. The gesture aims to reinforce a more plural and cosmopolitan national narrative, echoing the 2021 tribute to singer and resistant Joséphine Baker.
Yet this more inclusive national story requires coherence. The celebration of immigrant resisters cannot be separated from the current context, a country facing xenophobia intensified by far-right currents, argued Le Monde in an editorial that criticized Macron for centering the themes of the National Rally in his political strategy. Remembering antifascist resistance is one thing; applying it to today’s politics is another.