On 21 February, to the day eighty years after they were put to death by the Nazis, Missak Manouchian and his wife Mélinée were admitted to the Panthéon in Paris, an honour bestowed on only a few.
The announcement of this decision was no accident: it took place during the commemorations of the ‘Call of 18 June’, De Gaulle’s first speech on Radio London in 1940. According to the French presidential residence, the Elysée, Missak, an Armenian Jewish communist activist, had “chosen France twice, first by his will as a young Armenian in love with Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, then by shedding his blood for our country.” This false idea of a resistance united in patriotism behind General De Gaulle’s kepi does not honour his memory.
Missak and his comrades are representative of a whole generation of militant Jewish workers from Poland who came to France in the 1920s and embraced Stalinism, convinced that they were joining the ranks of the revolution. Their communist ideals were gradually tested by the twists and turns of Stalinist policies, the Moscow trials and the great purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union.
Initially grouped in the Main d’Oeuvre Etrangère (M.O.E.) of the Communist Party, which later became the Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée (M.O.I.), they participated in the ‘purge’ of Jewish circles, especially of Trotskyist influences. But when the red flag was exchanged for the national tricolored flag, especially around the Popular Front government, they themselves became increasingly suspicious in the eyes of the party leadership. The ’Jewish sub-division’ was dissolved in 1937, when many of its members were fighting Franco’s fascist insurrection in Spain.
On 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin made a pact. The news was terrible for Jewish communists. As René Revol explains: “All these militants, who had ousted the Trotskyists, approved the elimination of the old guard and fought in Spain (…) were shocked by the pact, isolated from their party and astonished, when they read it and saw that L’Humanité [the Communist Party newspaper] did not attack Hitler. They remained loyal to their party, but at the same time established clandestine structures to provide help and assistance, but also to fight, so that when the time came, they would be ready.”(1)
Active role in the resistance
In October 1940, during the occupation, they were still surprised that the PCF did not issue instructions on the obligation for Jews to register at the local police station. They began to go into hiding. Some took part in the big miners’ strike in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments in 1941.
“On 22 June 1941, when news came of the Wehrmacht’s attack [on the Soviet Union], the men of the MOI were ready for battle, more than the PCF, more than Stalin, who initially refused to believe the news,” says René Révol. When the PCF launched the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) organisation in late 1941 under the leadership of Charles Tillon, most of the groups were in fact Francs-Tireurs et Partisans — Main-d‘œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI). In 1942 and 1943, these groups of foreigners carried out about 80% of the FTP’s armed actions and sabotages.
However, their activities were deliberately forgotten after the war by both Charles Tillon and official PCF historians. Roger Pannequin, former commander of the FTP in the north, explains it as follows: “It was for narrow nationalist reasons that the particularities of migrant groups were pushed into the forgotten corner. This made it possible to add an extra F [French] to FTP which thus became FTPF. But there never was an FTPF. We need to insist on that. The second F came only after liberation, because we had to show that we were thoroughly nationalist. Then we got rid of the names of all the members who had committed the greatest acts of sabotage (…). Whenever a press release was needed, MOI activists were invariably forgotten (…). It was to make one forget the betrayal, the unacknowledged but real policy of collaboration with Hitler, that the order was given to go headlong into the resistance in 1942, with the most insane missions involving migrants on the front line.” (2)
Stalin and the end of the war
The victory over Nazism ushered in a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions. For the Soviet bureaucracy, the risk was that its privileges would be called into question. With Stalin in charge, the bureaucracy preferred to share the cake of the coming victory with the Allied powers, completely over the heads of the workers in the countries concerned. As a sign of goodwill to Churchill and Roosevelt, the Communist International was dissolved in 1943.
In France, the Communist Party embraced this dynamic of class collaboration. It adopted an ultra-nationalist course and tried to join the provisional French government installed in Algiers in 1944. Those for whom resistance only made sense as a prelude to revolution became a threat. They had to be crushed, especially as Stalinist militants began collaborating with fighters who held ‘suspicious’ political beliefs. Besides Missak Manouchian, there were, for instance, Arpen Tavitian, a former Red Army officer with a Trotskyist past (3), and a number of Spanish anarchists.
Most FTP units were gradually transferred to the ‘maquis’ (the underground movement in the countryside). In the cities, the survivors of the migrant groups faced repression, while there were orders urging them to carry out one spectacular action after another. In the summer of 1943, the four FTP-MOI detachments led by Manouchian were the only ones still active in Paris. The exact reasons for their arrest are still under debate. For Mélinée Manouchian, the Communist Party had simply handed her husband and his comrades over to the police. In any case there is no doubt that their execution was the direct result of being abandoned by the party.
The political antagonism between the PCF and these internationalist militants is brutally illustrated by the slogan ‘Each his own Fritz’ (‘A chacun son boche’), which appeared as the headline in L’Humanité in August 1944. As they were about to be shot, many members of the group around Manouchian chanted, “Long live the German Communist Party.” In his last letter, Missak Manouchian said, “I declare that I have no hatred for the German people.”
Missak and his comrades did not die “for France”. Their lives were dedicated to the struggle for socialism. Their sincere commitment was sacrificed in the name of defending the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and today it is French president Macron who wants to exploit their struggle by eliminating any political aspiration. The best way to pay tribute to them is to take up and continue their struggle, until the day the red flag will once again fly over the Panthéon, as it did during the Paris Commune in 1871.
Notes
- René Revol, “Derrière l’affaire manouchian: le dévoiement d’une génération”, Cahiers Léon Trotsky n°23, september 1985.
- Maurice Farjus, “L’An prochain, la révolution — Les communistes juifs immigrés dans la tourmente stalinienne 1930–1945”, Editions Mazarine, 1985, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky nr. 23.
- Guy Van Sinoy, “Arpen Tavitian — De l’Armée Rouge… à l’Affiche Rouge”, Lutte Socialiste n° 247 (décembre 2019-janvier 2020).
