In a symbolic gesture to acknowledge that women as well as men have made French history, François Hollande has interred two female heroes of the resistance in the Panthéon, the resting place of the nation’s great, reports The Guardian.
The French president honoured four wartime resistance figures in total on Wednesday: Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion, who survived capture and deportation, and two men, Pierre Brossolette and Jean Zay, who died in terrible circumstances before the end of the war.
The only other woman to have been honoured in the Panthéon, over whose door is written “The nation thanks its great men”, is the Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, whose ashes were moved there in 1995. Another woman was buried there, Sophie Berthelot, but only to be close to her husband, the chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot. There are 72 men in the mausoleum in Paris’s Latin quarter.
Hollande lauded the spirit of the resistance and warned that indifference was “today’s enemy”. He used his speech to caution against a resurgence of antisemitism and of democracy, and to defend what he called thespirit of libertydisplayed in the street demonstrations that followed January’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was the niece of Charles de Gaulle. Her engineer father made her read Mein Kampf when she was 14 so she could understand the horror of the Nazis. She was 20 when the Nazi occupation began and her uncle called from London for the French to keep fighting. She joined a resistance movement based around academics at Paris’s anthropology museum, the Musée de l’Homme. In 1943, she was captured in a Paris book shop and deported to the Ravensbruck, the largest concentration camp for women.
She later described coming close to death in the filth of the camp, surrounded by women who were massacred at random, and attacked by dogs. She spent part of her time in isolation after Heinrich Himmler, aware of her name, decided to keep her alive as a possible exchange prisoner. She was finally released in April 1945 and received a letter from her uncle saying he was “extremely proud” of her, and she should get back on her feet because “France needs girls like you”.