Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan and French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday evening attended the ceremony of enshrining the remains of WWII resistance fighter Missak Manouchian and his wife Mélinée Manouchian in the Pantheon in Paris.

The Panthéon is the resting place of France’s most revered figures including    Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Èmile Zola, and Marie Curie. 

The names of twenty-three of Manouchian’s fellow resistance fighters, most of whom were shot with him on February 21, 1944 by the Nazis will be engraved in the vault where the couple was laid to rest.

"A grateful France welcomes you, Missak and Mélinée,” said Macron at a ceremony held exactly eighty years after they were killed. "The France of 2024 owes you this honor.”

Members of the French foreign legion carried the coffins of Manouchian and his wife, draped in French flags into the secular temple.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, former French President François Hollande, members of Armenian and French governments, legislative bodies, public and political figures attended the ceremony.

Photo credit: primeminister.am