Emmanuel Macron launches celebrations for the eightieth anniversary of the Liberation | EUROtoday

Published on : 07/04/2024 – 04:03

4 minutes

This is a brand new cycle of commemorations, After the pantheonization of Missak Manouchian and the tribute to the resistance fighters and the youngsters of Izieu. Emmanuel Macron begins on Sunday the “journey of memory” across the eightieth anniversary of the Liberation, which is able to culminate in June with the Normandy Landings.

In the morning, the Head of State will attain the Glières plateau, within the Alps, the scene of battles which opposed the German military and the French militia to the resistance in March 1944.

At 12:00 p.m., he’ll chair a ceremony and ship a speech on the Thônes necropolis (Haute-Savoie), the place 105 resistance fighters are buried, within 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 within the afternoon to the Maison d'Izieu (Ain), the place 44 Jewish youngsters had been rounded up by the Gestapo on the orders of Klaus Barbie on April 6, 1944. All had been deported and murdered within the Auschwitz camps. -Birkenau (Poland) and Reval (Estonia).

This lengthy cycle of commemorations opened with a tribute to Jean Moulin, chief of the Resistance, in 2023, then the entry into the Pantheon of Missak Manouchian, international 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 adviser, recalling the the involvement of the militia to battle towards the resistance.

“Live Free or Die”

Emmanuel Macron had already made the journey to Glières within the firm of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, on March 31, 2019, for the seventy fifth anniversary of the preventing.

From January to March 1944, 465 resistance fighters gathered on this plateau in Haute-Savoie to obtain airdrops of weapons from the Allies, within the run-up to the Provence Landings (August 1944).

The German military and the militia invaded the place on the finish of March 1944. Two thirds of the resistance fighters had been taken prisoner and 124 had been killed through the preventing or shot, 9 disappeared and 16 died in deportation.

The Head of State can pay tribute to the range 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 Élysée.

In Izieu, Emmanuel Macron will recall that “the sole basis of anti-Semitism is hatred”, continues the presidency. France has skilled a resurgence of anti-Semitism because the unprecedented assault by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the response by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Prelude to the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings

Between May 1943 and April 1944, the Izieu colony, based by Sabine Zlatin, a Jewish resistance fighter of Polish origin, and her husband Miron Zlatin, who had fled the Russian Revolution, took in round 100 youngsters, typically for a number of weeks. .

Emmanuel Macron may even pay tribute on April 16 to the Vercors maquis (Drôme), a primary for an lively president.

This will then be adopted by celebrations for the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings, on June 6, at which American President Joe Biden is predicted.

Then there will likely be a tribute to Georges Mandel, assassinated on July 7, 1944 within the forest of Fontainebleau, the eightieth anniversary of the Landing of Provence and the liberation of Paris in August and at last that of Strasbourg in November.

Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has been making nationwide tributes and historic references, greater than his predecessors, with the potential exception of General de Gaulle.

A manner for him to invoke a Nation introduced collectively in occasions of fractures, and to stipulate, implicitly, his personal political undertaking.

After the “memorial wandering” across the First World War in 2018, the commemorations of the Liberation should represent a spotlight of its second five-year time period, with the Paris Olympics.

With AFP