The last humiliation of Missak Manouchian

In three days' time, on February 21, 2024, the remains of Missak Manouchian will be transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. Eighty years after he was executed by the Nazis, he will unwillingly take part in what we can only name the irony of history. But he will not be able to escape this last humiliation, because, despite the time-honored expression, no dead man can express his refusal by turning over in his grave. The words of the French poet Aragon are long gone:

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You asked for neither glory nor tears

Nor the organ nor the prayer for the dying.

Aragon,

L'Affiche Rouge

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Missak Manouchian was not born a legend of the French Resistance, any more than he was born a poet or a communist activist. He was simply born an Armenian child in an Ottoman Empire that had decided to exterminate all its own kind. He grew up in an orphanage after his father was murdered by Turkish gendarmes and his mother starved to death in the concentration camp where the Young Turk government had thrown them. He left the orphanage for France in 1925 with his brother, who died of tuberculosis shortly after his arrival.

Missak Manouchian will enter the Pantheon in 2024, exactly one hundred years after Jean Jaurès. Another irony of history... how can we fail to compare these two ceremonies, so similar are they? The ceremony dedicated to Jean Jaurès, organized by a coalition government, was described by Communist leader Paul Vaillant-Couturier as a second assassination, so odious was it that those who had never wanted to defend Jaurès during his lifetime, and thus paved the way for his assassination, should use his virtue for political gain:

"This is the second assassination of Jaurès [...] making of his remains a luminous, tricolored sign for the government [...] delivering the corpse of Jaurès in triumph to the bourgeoisie who had him assassinated."

Paul Vaillant-Couturier,

L'Humanité, 1924-11-23

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Like Jaurès, Manouchian will have to take part in a ceremony in which sincere reverence will be mixed with cynical political calculation: while the two "brother-states" of Turkey and Azerbaijan set about completing the genocide begun in 1915; while they have just (in September 2023) crushed and then deported what remained of the Armenians in the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), the French government expressed its "grave concern", and as always in such cases, in the name of raison d'état, did nothing. In this context, to honor a resistant child of Armenia falls under hypocrisy.

Of course, France does not have a monopoly on the practice of raison d'état. But the fact remains that it is incoherent to honor with the right hand values that the left hand is quick to forget. An entry into the Panthéon cannot make us forget the gas agreements with Azerbaijan to ensure an energy supply (with gas... imported from Russia!). And if raison d'état dictates that the people of Artsakh be abandoned to their fate, that we keep silent about the hundreds of deaths in isolated villages who defended themselves to the bitter end, and about the dozens of hostages taken alive in Artsakh and taken prisoner in Baku, then decency would dictate that we renounce taking advantage of the heroic memory of an Armenian. In the present circumstances, the transfer of Missak Manouchian's remains to the Panthéon can no longer be seen as the noble expression of rememberance duty: it is just a bit of powder thrown in the eyes of the descendants of those Armenian immigrants who arrived in France in the 1920s, like my grandfather.

Truly honoring the memory of Missak Manouchian would have meant delivering weapons to the Armenian army or recognizing the independence of Artsakh. After all, Artsakh was the birthplace of another Armenian resistance fighter in the groupe Manouchian, his comrade Arpen Tavitian.

As for all those who in the coming days will trade on the memory of Missak Manouchian, let them ponder his last words, written just before his execution:

"I forgive all those who have harmed me or wanted to harm me, except the one who betrayed us to redeem his skin, and those who sold us out."

Missak Manouchian, last letter to his wife

en fran?ais?: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/lultime-humiliation-de-missak-manouchian-vazken-andr%C3%A9assian-8nm1e/

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