Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credits: 4:04 p.m., April 5, 2024
The Jean-Jaurès high school in Châtenay-Malabry (Hauts-de-Seine) will be renamed at the start of the 2024 school year "Missak and Mélinée Manouchian", named after the couple of foreign resistance fighters recently pantheonized, the Ile-de-France regional council announced on Friday. of France.
"The inscription of the names of Missak and Mélinée Manouchian on the pediment of a Châtenais high school, in the same street where Missak Manouchian lived, on the outskirts of the Cité Jardin, classified as a priority district of the City, is a coherent choice which makes sense", greets the mayor of Châtenay-Malabry Carl Segaud this Friday. Responsible for the management of high schools, he spoke via a press release from the Regional Council.
A symbolic tribute
“Moreover, it is a strong symbol given the crucial role played by secondary education establishments in the transmission of memory to younger generations,” adds Mr. Segaud, also LR regional advisor, at the origin of proposal. The LR president of the Île-de-France region Valérie Pécresse will soon propose to the region's Permanent Commission to ratify this choice.
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“By renaming the Missak and Mélinée Manouchian high school, we are loudly proclaiming a message for the Republic, for its defense and that of its universal values of freedom, equality and fraternity,” she explains in the same press release. . A naming ceremony is expected at the start of the 2024 school year. On February 21, Missak Manouchian and 23 of his comrades-in-arms entered the Pantheon, the ultimate tribute to these long-forgotten shadow fighters.
Figures of the resistance
Survivor of the Armenian genocide, stateless and communist, Missak Manouchian became a figure of the Resistance. In 1934, the young man joined the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Relief Committee for Armenia. It is there that he meets Mélinée, also an orphan survivor of the Armenian genocide. At the beginning of 1943, Missak Manouchian joined the armed communist resistance group, the Francs-tireurs et partisans-immigrant labor (FTP-MOI).
On the morning of November 16, 1943, when Missak Manouchian had to find the leader of the FTP-MOI in the Paris region, Joseph Epstein, the two men were arrested then tortured and imprisoned for several months. At the end of a mock trial reported in the collaborationist press, Missak Manouchian was shot at the age of 37, with around twenty of his comrades. His wife Mélinée, also a resistance fighter, died in 1989.