Missak Manouchian

Manouchian is registered as being born on 1 September 1906 in Adıyaman, in Mamuret-ul-Aziz Vilayet, Ottoman Empire into an Armenian peasant family.

It was discovered in February 2024 that he was in fact born in 1909, when pages from his notebooks, discovered in May 2023 by his family at the Charents Museum of Literature and Arts, were obtained at the last minute for the exhibition celebrating his transfer to the Panthéon, and exhibited although not yet exploited by French researchers, as they were written in Armenian: his great-grandniece Hasmik Manouchian read in an entry dated February 1935 that he was 25.

She said that this corroborated family stories that he had made himself older by three years, as he was not 18 when he arrived in France, but 15, too young to be allowed to work.

The historian Denis Peschanski, who curated the exhibition, pointed out that this was relatively common for immigrants to France at the time.

His tomb at the Panthéon, installed a short time before, is engraved with the date 1906.

Missak Manouchian (Western Միսաք Մանուշեան;, 1 September 1909 – 21 February 1944) was an Armenian poet and communist activist.

A survivor of the 1915–16 Armenian genocide, he moved to France from an orphanage in Lebanon in 1925.

He was active in communist Armenian literary circles.

During World War II, he became the military commissioner of FTP-MOI, a group consisting of European immigrants, including many Jews, in the Paris Region which carried out assassinations and bombings of Nazi targets.

According to one author, the Manouchian group was the most active one of the French Resistance.

His parents were killed during the Armenian genocide of 1915, but he and his brother managed to survive.

In the early 1920s he settled in an Armenian General Benevolent Union-run orphanage in Jounieh, Lebanon, then a French protectorate.

He acquired education there and in 1925 moved to France.

Eventually, Manouchian settled in Paris, where he took a job as a lathe operator at a Citroën plant.

During this period he was self-educated and often visited libraries in the Latin Quarter.

He joined the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT), a national association of trade unions which was the first of the five major French confederations.

In the early 1930s, when the world-wide economic crisis of the Great Depression set in, Missak Manouchian lost his job.

Disaffected with capitalism, he began earning a meager living by posing as a model for sculptors.

In 1934, Manouchian joined the French Communist Party.

From 1935 to 1937 he edited the Armenian-language left-wing weekly newspaper Zangou, named after a river in Armenia.

The newspaper was anti-fascist, anti-Dashnak, anti-imperialist and pro-Soviet.

Manouchian wrote poetry and, with an Armenian friend who used the pseudonym of Séma (Kégham Atmadjian), founded two communist-leaning literary magazines, Tchank ("Effort") and Mechagouyt ("Culture").

They published articles on French literature and Armenian culture.

The two young men translated the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud into Armenian, making many of these works available in Armenian for the first time.

Both Manouchian and Séma enrolled at the Sorbonne to follow courses in literature, philosophy, economics, and history.

The following year, he was elected secretary of the Relief Committee for Armenia (HOC), an organization associated with the MOI (Immigrant Workforce Movement).

At a meeting of the HOC in 1935, he met Mélinée Assadourian, who became his companion and, later, his wife.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939 Manouchian, as a foreigner, was evacuated from Paris.

He found work in the Rouen area, again as a lathe-operator.

After the defeat of June 1940, he returned to Paris to find that his militant activities had become illegal.

(French authorities had banned the Communist Party as early as September 1939.) On 22 June 1941, when the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis began, Manouchian was arrested by the occupying Germans in an anti-communist round-up in Paris.

Interned in a prison camp at Compiègne, by the efforts of his wife Mélinée Assadourian, he was released after a few weeks without being charged.

Manouchian became the political chief of the Armenian section of the underground MOI, but little is known about his activities until 1943.

In February of that year, Manouchian transferred to the FTP-MOI, a group of gunmen and saboteurs attached to the MOI in Paris.

Manouchian became the leader of the FTP-MOI in June/August 1943, replacing Boris Holban.

Manouchian assumed command of three detachments, totaling about 50 fighters.

The Manouchian group is credited with the assassination on 28 September 1943, of General Julius Ritter, the assistant in France to Fritz Sauckel, responsible for the mobilization and deportation of labor under the German STO (Obligatory Work Service) in Nazi-occupied Europe.

(The attack was made by the partisans Marcel Rayman, Léo Kneller, and Celestino Alfonso.) The Manouchian groups carried out almost thirty successful attacks on German interests from August to November 1943.

Manouchian and many of his comrades were arrested in November 1943 and executed by the Nazis at Fort Mont-Valérien on 21 February 1944.

He is considered a hero of the French Resistance and was entombed in the Panthéon in Paris.