Maurice Genevoix's coffin at the Panthéon, November 11, 2020. -

Francois Mori / AP / SIPA

Emmanuel Macron celebrated “French courage” by presiding Wednesday the entry into the Pantheon of the writer Maurice Genevoix, who offered “the immortality of words” to all the soldiers who died during the First World War.

The author, born in 1890, had been mobilized and had participated in the fighting in the trenches, where he had been seriously injured.

With Maurice Genevoix, the hairy "enter here today, finally" to the Pantheon, "the temple of the heroes of our Fatherland", declared the Head of State by closing the one hour ceremony.

"Here they are arriving by the millions to enter under this dome", he added, citing these "ordinary heroes" to whom Maurice Genevoix gave back, in his collection "Those of 14", "names, faces , accents ”.

A ceremony without an audience

It is, he continued, “the story of women and men animated by the courage of those who know why they are fighting.

French courage.

The same one that had raised those of 1789, the Volunteers of year II, of all our wars.

The very one, too, who allowed us to build, with our Europe, the peace we owed them.

Not a peace made up of cowardice and renunciation, but that of constant dialogue, respectful of our histories, our differences, our values ​​”.

Containment required, this celebration took place in a small committee and without an audience, such as, in the morning, the commemoration of the 102nd anniversary of the Armistice of 1918 and the centenary of the burial of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe.

Pantheonization announced in 2018

At 6 p.m., Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by his wife Brigitte, kicked off the ceremony on the forecourt of the Pantheon, with the arrangement of 101 glass cubes, each containing a handful of soil from one of the 101 departments French.

On the 101st, students from the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) deposited a handful of Terre des Eparges (Meuse), where Maurice Genevoix was injured during the fighting.

It was at Eparges, in November 2018, that Emmanuel Macron announced the entry into the Pantheon of the writer.

After a projection of images on the facade of the Pantheon, the coffin of Maurice Genevoix, carried by the Republican Guard, went up rue Soufflot to the nave of the Pantheon.

Actors then read two texts, including an excerpt from "Those of 14", before the speech of the Head of State.

This entry of Genevoix into the Pantheon was desired by the family of the author of Raboliot, who died in 1980.

Society

Ceremony of November 11: With Maurice Genevoix, the memory of the Poilus enters the Panthéon

Culture

The novelist Maurice Genevoix and "those of 14" at the Panthéon in 2019

  • Emmanuel Macron

  • Society

  • Pantheon

  • First World War