French-Armenian Resistance hero Missak Manouchian to enter Panthéon

Armenian genocide survivor and French Resistance hero Missak Manouchian will enter France’s Pantheon mausoleum of revered historical figures next year, President Emmanuel Macron announced on Sunday.

Stencil portraits of resistance fighters Pierre Brossolette and Missak Manouchian made by the artist C215 in Fresnes prison. AFP - JOEL SAGET

"Manouchian carries a part of our greatness", Macron said in a statement, adding the French-Armenian poet and communist embodied France’s “universal values” of liberty, equality and fraternity.

He is to be inducted into the Panthéon – which already honours eight other French Resistance heroes, including Jean Moulin – on February 21, 2024.

"It is not just him who will be entering the Pantheon; it is the flame of the entire Resistance," said his great niece Missak Manouchian.

According to the wishes of his family, his wife Mélinée – also part of the resistance – will join him in the mausoleum, although she will not receive the “pantheonisation” of her husband.

Stateless refugee

After arriving in France as a stateless refugee in 1925, Manouchian led one of the most active armed groups against the Nazis.

The Manouchian group of foreign resistance fighters was made up of about 60 men and women, including a number of Jews, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF).

Manouchian carried out nearly a hundred armed and sabotage operations in the Paris region, including the execution of SS General Julius Ritter, head of the compulsory labour, in September 1943.

• France remembers Oradour, a WWII massacre and the martyred village left behind
• Why a far-right gang once tried to steal the corpse of France's Marshal Pétain

In 1944 the group was put out of action when 23 of its members were rounded up and sentenced to death by a German military court.

They were sentenced to death in 1944, with Manouchian shot by the Nazis on 21 February, 1944.

By entering the Pantheon, Manouchian will become both the first foreign and communist Resistance fighter to be awarded the honour.

Other major French figures to be reburied in the Pantheon, which sits on a hill in Paris’s Left Bank, include Victor Hugo, Voltaire and Marie Curie.