Noémie Loiselle with AFP / Photo credit: MATHILDE KACZKOWSKI / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP 08:30 a.m., April 7, 2024

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of France, Emmanuel Macron begins a cycle of commemoration this Sunday. The Head of State is expected at the national necropolis of Thônes, in Haute-Savoie, where 105 resistance fighters rest, in the presence of the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet and the Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu.

After the pantheonization of Missak Manouchian, the tribute to the maquisards and the children of Izieu: Emmanuel Macron begins on Sunday the "journey of memory" around the 80th anniversary of the Liberation, which will culminate in June with the Normandy Landings. In the morning, the Head of State will reach the Glières plateau, in the Alps, scene of battles which opposed the German army and the French militia to the resistance in March 1944.

"Renaissance"

At 12:00 p.m., he will chair a ceremony and deliver a speech at the Thônes necropolis (Haute-Savoie), where 105 resistance fighters are buried, in the presence of the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet and the Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu. He will then go in the afternoon to the Maison d'Izieu (Ain), where 44 Jewish children were rounded up by the Gestapo on the orders of Klaus Barbie on April 6, 1944. All were deported and murdered in the Auschwitz camps. -Birkenau (Poland) and Reval (Estonia).

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This long cycle of commemorations opened with a tribute to Jean Moulin, leader of the Resistance, in 2023, then the entry into the Pantheon of Missak Manouchian, foreign communist resistance fighter, in February. Now begins that of the "Renaissance" of France with the victory over the Nazi occupier and the Vichy regime in 1944. "The president's mission is to say that we have a particular history which is a great history but which also has its gray areas, which we must know how to face", underlines a presidential advisor, recalling the involvement of the militia in fighting against the resistance.

"Hate"

Emmanuel Macron had already made the trip to Glières in the company of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, on March 31, 2019, for the 75th anniversary of the fighting. From January to March 1944, 465 resistance fighters gathered on this plateau in Haute-Savoie to receive airdrops of weapons from the Allies, in the run-up to the Provence Landings (August 1944). The German army and the militia invaded the place at the end of March 1944. Two thirds of the resistance fighters were taken prisoner and 124 were killed during the fighting or shot, nine disappeared and 16 died in deportation.

The Head of State will pay tribute to the diversity of the fighters, "French 'by birth' mountain dwellers from the region, career soldiers, resisters of the Compulsory Labor Service (...), anti-Franco activists in particular, who rose up under a same motto, 'Live free or die', to fight Nazism and defend the values ​​of the Republic", notes the Elysée. In Izieu, Emmanuel Macron will recall that “the sole basis of anti-Semitism is hatred”, continues the presidency. France has experienced a resurgence of anti-Semitism since the unprecedented attack by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the response by the Israeli army in Gaza.

Memory and Olympics

Between May 1943 and April 1944, the Izieu colony, founded by Sabine Zlatin, a Jewish resistance fighter of Polish origin, and her husband Miron Zlatin, who had fled the Russian Revolution, took in around a hundred children, sometimes for a few weeks. . Emmanuel Macron will also pay tribute on April 16 to the Vercors maquis (Drôme), a first for an active president. This will then be followed by celebrations for the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, on June 6, at which American President Joe Biden is expected. Then there will be a tribute to Georges Mandel, assassinated on July 7, 1944 in the forest of Fontainebleau, the 80th anniversary of the Landing of Provence and the liberation of Paris in August and finally that of Strasbourg in November.

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Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has been making national tributes and historical references, more than his predecessors, with the possible exception of General de Gaulle. A way for him to invoke a Nation brought together in times of fractures, and to outline, implicitly, his own political project. After the “memorial wandering” around the First World War in 2018, the commemorations of the Liberation must constitute a highlight of its second five-year term, with the Paris Olympics.