Affiche Rouge
Encyclopedia
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
poster, distributed by Vichy French
Vichy France
Vichy France, Vichy Regime, or Vichy Government, are common terms used to describe the government of France that collaborated with the Axis powers from July 1940 to August 1944. This government succeeded the Third Republic and preceded the Provisional Government of the French Republic...
and German authorities in the spring of 1944 in occupied Paris, to discredit 23 French Resistance
French Resistance
The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
fighters, members of the Manouchian Group. The term Affiche Rouge also refers more broadly to the circumstances surrounding the poster's creation and distribution, namely, the capture, trial and execution of these members of the Manouchian Group.
Background
In mid-November 1943, the French police arrested 23 members of the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI), who were part of the French ResistanceFrench Resistance
The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
. They were called the "Manouchian Group" after the commander, Missak Manouchian
Missak Manouchian
Missak Manouchian was a French poet of Armenian birth, a militant communist in the MOI , and military commissioner of the FTP-MOI in the Paris region...
. The group was part of a network of about 100 fighters, who committed nearly all acts of armed resistance in the Paris metropolitan region between March and November 1943.
Its membership included 22 men: eight Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
, five Italians, three Hungarians, two Armenians
Armenians
Armenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....
, a Spaniard, and three French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
; and one woman, who was Romanian
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
. Eleven were also Jewish.
After having been tortured and interrogated for three months, the 23 were tried by a German military court. In an effort to discredit the Resistance, the authorities invited French celebrities (from the world of the cinema and other arts) to attend the trial and encouraged the media to give it the widest coverage possible. All but one of the Manouchian Group's members were executed before a firing squad in Fort Mont-Valérien on February 21, 1944. Olga Bancic
Olga Bancic
Olga Bancic , also known under her French nom de guerre Pierrette , was a Jewish Romanian communist, known for her role in the French Resistance during World War II. A member of the FTP-MOI and the Manouchian Group, she was captured by Nazi German forces in late 1943...
, who had served the group as a messenger, was taken to Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
, where she was beheaded with an axe on May 10, 1944.
In the spring of 1944, the Vichy authorities launched a propaganda campaign, designed to discredit the Manouchian Group and defuse public anger over their execution. They created a poster, which became known as Affiche Rouge, due to its red background. It featured ten men of the group, with nationality, surnames, photos and descriptions of their crimes. The Germans distributed an estimated 15,000 copies of the poster. Along with these posters, the Germans handed out flyers' claiming the Resistance was headed by foreigners, Jews, unemployed people and criminals; the campaign characterized the Resistance as a "foreigners' conspiracy against French life and the sovereignty of France":
"Si des Français pillent, volent, sabotent et tuent...
Ce sont toujours des étrangers qui les commandent.
Ce sont toujours des chômeurs et des criminels professionnels qui exécutent.
Ce sont toujours des juifs qui les inspirent.
C’est l’armée du crime contre la France.
Le banditisme n’est pas l’expression du Patriotisme blessé, c’est le complot étranger contre la vie des Français et contre la souveraineté de la France."
Although the poster attempted to depict the group as "terrorists", the campaign seems to have had the effect of highlighting the feats of people whom the general public saw as freedom fighters
Resistance movement
A resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to opposing an invader in an occupied country or the government of a sovereign state. It may seek to achieve its objects through either the use of nonviolent resistance or the use of armed force...
. Legend has it that supporters scribbled the words MORTS POUR LA FRANCE (They died for France - the phrase used on official monuments to soldiers of France who died in combat) and put flowers beneath some of the posters. In 1975, Philippe Ganier Raymond claimed that there was no historical record of such activity; more recent research indicates that such additions occurred.
Legacy
In 1955, Louis AragonLouis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
wrote a poem memorializing the Manouchian Group, "Strophes pour se souvenir
L'affiche rouge (Poem)
L'Affiche rouge is a song on the album Léo Ferré chante Aragon by Léo Ferré. Its lyrics are based on the poem Strophes pour se souvenir which Louis Aragon wrote in 1955 for the inauguration of a street in the 20th arrondissement in Paris, named "rue du Groupe Manouchian" in honor of 23 members of...
".
Léo Ferré
Léo Ferré was a Franco-Monegasque poet, composer, singer and musician.Born in Monaco, Ferré mixed love and melancholy with moral anarchy, lyricism with slang, rhyming verse with prose monologues...
set it to music and recorded it as "L'Affiche rouge". Rouben Melik
Rouben Melik
Rouben Melik was a French-Armenian poet and a member of French Resistance. Officer of Ordre des Arts et Lettres ....
and Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
also wrote poems in honour of the Manouchian Group.
In 1997, at the prompting of Robert Badinter
Robert Badinter
Robert Badinter is a high-profile French criminal lawyer, university professor and politician mainly known for his struggle against the death penalty, the abolition of which he successfully sponsored in Parliament in 1981...
, the French Parliament authorized the erection of a monument commemorating the execution at Mont-Valérien between 1940 and 1944 of 1,006 citizens and members of the French Resistance, including the Manouchian Group. The sculptor Pascal Convert created the monument, and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin
Jean-Pierre Raffarin
Jean-Pierre Raffarin is a French conservative politician and senator for Vienne.Jean-Pierre Raffarin served as the Prime Minister of France from 6 May 2002 to 31 May 2005, resigning after France's rejection of the referendum on the European Union draft constitution. However, after Raffarin...
dedicated it on September 20, 2003.
Controversy
In the 1980s, some French political factions suggested that there was complicity by some members of the Resistance in the capture of many of the members of the Manouchian Group, because of political infighting.A film documentary by Stéphane Courtois
Stéphane Courtois
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian, an internationally known expert on communist studies, particularly the history of communism and communist genocides, and author of several books...
and Mosco Boucault, Des terroristes à la retraite, broadcast by Antenne 2 in 1983, included interviews of surviving FTP-MOI members and families of the victims. Bouscault accused the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
(PCF) of having deliberately sacrificed the fighters in the power struggle with the Gaullists for control over the National Council of Resistance (CNR). He suggested this was done because the fighters' foreign origins undermined French depictions of the Resistance as a native patriotic
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
movement. The film was rebroadcast in 2001, minus 12 minutes deleted to reflect more recent historical research.
La traque de l’Affiche rouge, a documentary produced by Denis Peschanski and Jorge Amat, broadcast by France 2
France 2
France 2 is a French public national television channel. It is part of the state-owned France Télévisions group, along with France 3, France 4, France 5 and France Ô...
on 15 March 2007, refuted Courtois and Boucault's allegations. Quoting the historian Denis Peschanski, who had access to new documents from the Russian, French and German archives, the new documentary alleged that the fall of the Manouchian Group had been due exclusively to the French police's work. The two newly created branches of the Renseignements généraux (RG) intelligence agency—the Brigades spéciales 1 and 2—had trailed the Résistance fighters for months. On 28 September 1943, Marcel Rayman
Marcel Rayman
Marcel Rayman, alias Simon Maujean, Faculté, Michel, and Michel Mieczlav 1 May 1923, Warsaw, Poland − 21 February 1944, fort du Mont-Valérien) was a Polish Jew and volunteer fighter in the FTP-MOI group of French resistance fighters during World War II, and the head of "Stalingrad", a highly active...
killed the SS General Julius von Ritter in a bombing; Ritter organized the forced labor of the Service du travail obligatoire
Service du travail obligatoire
The Service du travail obligatoire was the forced enlistment and deportation of hundreds of thousands of French workers to Nazi Germany in order to work as forced labour for the German war effort during World War II....
(STO). At that time, Rayman had already been under surveillance for two months. The French Milice
Milice
The Milice française , generally called simply Milice, was a paramilitary force created on January 30, 1943 by the Vichy Regime, with German aid, to help fight the French Resistance. The Milice's formal leader was Prime Minister Pierre Laval, though its chief of operations, and actual leader, was...
arrested and dismantled the Manouchian Group after the attack, aided by information given up by some members under torture
Torture
Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...
.
In September 2009, the dramatic film L'Armée du crime
The Army of Crime
The Army of Crime is a 2009 French drama-war film directed by Robert Guédiguian and based on a story by Serge Le Péron, one of three credited for the screenplay. It received a wide release in France on September 16, 2009 and opened in the United States in 2010.The film deals with the events of the...
opened in France, featuring the story of the Manouchian Group. Directed by Robert Guédiguian
Robert Guédiguian
Robert Jules Guédiguian is a French film director, actor, screenwriter and producer. Most of his films star Ariane Ascaride and Jean-Pierre Darroussin....
, a Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
-based filmmaker of German and Armenian parentage, it was adapted from a story by Serge Le Péron. It reflects some of the divisions among the Résistance. In association, the last surviving member of the FTP-MOI group, Arsène Tchakarian, was interviewed. She spoke out and decisively refuted the allegation that the PCF had betrayed the Manouchian Group. She said that 35 members of the 40 in the group were communists. The film opened in the United States in 2010.
Content
The poster reads:
Des libérateurs? La libération par l'armée du crime!
"Liberators? Liberation by the army of crime!"
From left to right, and top to bottom, individual portraits are labeled:
- GRZYWACZSzlama GrzywaczSzlama Grzywacz was one of the members of the French resistance executed at the fort of Mont Valérien as a member of the Manouchian group, a volunteer of the French liberation army FTP-MOI. His name is one of the ten which featured on the Affiche Rouge displayed by the Germans during the trial of...
: Juif polonais, 2 attentats (Polish Jew, 2 terrorist attacks) - ELEKThomas ElekThomas Elek, also known as Támas Elek and KERPAL was one of the members of the French resistance executed at the fort of Mont Valérien as a member of the Manouchian Group, a volunteer of the French liberation army FTP-MOI...
: Juif hongrois, 5 déraillements (Hungarian Jew, 5 derailments) - WASJBROTWolf WajsbrotWolf Wajsbrot was a member of the French Resistance under the Nazi occupation. Born in the Polish town of Kraśnik, his parents moved to France, eventually settling in Paris, shortly after his birth due to increasing anti-semitism and a worsening economic climate.In 1939, the year Germany invaded...
: Juif polonais, 1 attentat, 1 déraillement (Polish Jew, 1 terrorist attack, 1 derailment) - WITCHITZRobert WitchitzRobert Witchitz was a volunteer soldier in the French liberation force FTP-MOI in the group of Missak Manouchian.- Youth :...
: Juif polonais, 15 attentats (Polish Jew, 15 terrorist attacks - although it is unclear if Witchitz was in fact Jewish or Polish) - FINGERCWAJGMaurice FingercwajgMaurice Fingercwajg also Mojsze, Fingercweig , was one of the resistance fighters shot at the Fort Mont Valérien, a volunteer soldier in the French liberation army FTP-MOI and a member of the group of Missak Manouchian.- Biography :Fingercwajg was born on 25 December 1923 in Warsaw, Poland...
: Juif polonais, 3 attentats, 5 déraillements (Polish Jew, 3 terrorist attacks, 5 derailments) - BOCZOVJoseph BoczovJoseph Boczov or József Boczor, aka Ferenc Wolff , was a chemical engineer, Hungarian Jew, and volunteer fighter for the French liberation army FTP-MOI. In 1942 Boczov founded and led the 4th detachment, called the dérailleurs, as they specialized in derailing trains...
: Juif hongrois, chef dérailleur, 20 attentats (Hungarian Jew, chief of derailment operations, 20 terrorist attacks) - FONTANOTSpartaco FontanoSpartaco Fontano , was one of the members of the French resistance shot at Mont Valérien as a member of the Manouchian group. He was an Italian volunteer soldier in the French liberation army FTP-MOI...
: Communiste italien, 12 attentats (Italian Communist, 12 terrorist attacks. His correct name was Fontano) - ALFONSOCelestino AlfonsoCélestino Alfonso was a Spanish republican, a volunteer in the French liberation army FTP-MOI, and a part of the resistance operation led by Missak Manouchian. He was, by profession, a carpenter.-Youth:Alfonso arrived in France at the beginning of the 1930s...
: Espagnol rouge, 2 attentats (Red Spaniard, 2 terrorist attacks) - RAYMANMarcel RaymanMarcel Rayman, alias Simon Maujean, Faculté, Michel, and Michel Mieczlav 1 May 1923, Warsaw, Poland − 21 February 1944, fort du Mont-Valérien) was a Polish Jew and volunteer fighter in the FTP-MOI group of French resistance fighters during World War II, and the head of "Stalingrad", a highly active...
: Juif polonais, 13 attentats (Polish Jew, 13 terrorist attacks) - MANOUCHIANMissak ManouchianMissak Manouchian was a French poet of Armenian birth, a militant communist in the MOI , and military commissioner of the FTP-MOI in the Paris region...
: Arménien, chef de bande, 56 attentats, 150 morts, 600 blessés (Armenian, boss of the gang, 56 terrorist attacks, 150 dead, 600 wounded)
The bottom features photographs of:
- the right shoulder and right chest of a corpse, riddled by bullet holes
- a dead body lying on the ground
- a derailed locomotive
- a derailed train
- a collection of small arms, grenades, and bomb components, displayed on a table
- another derailed train
Films
Fiction- Franck Cassenti, L'Affiche Rouge (1976)
- Robert GuédiguianRobert GuédiguianRobert Jules Guédiguian is a French film director, actor, screenwriter and producer. Most of his films star Ariane Ascaride and Jean-Pierre Darroussin....
, L'Armée Du CrimeThe Army of CrimeThe Army of Crime is a 2009 French drama-war film directed by Robert Guédiguian and based on a story by Serge Le Péron, one of three credited for the screenplay. It received a wide release in France on September 16, 2009 and opened in the United States in 2010.The film deals with the events of the...
(2009)
Documentary
- Stéphane CourtoisStéphane CourtoisStéphane Courtois is a French historian, an internationally known expert on communist studies, particularly the history of communism and communist genocides, and author of several books...
and Mosco Boucault, Des terroristes à la retraite (1983) - Pascal Convert , Mont-Valérien, aux noms des fusillés
- Denis Peschanski – Jorge Amat , La traque de l’Affiche rouge (2007)
External links
- L’Armée du crime. Arsène Tchakarian « S’emparer de la vérité»
- L’Armée du crime: An Interview with Arsène Tchakarian (English language version of above article)
- 21 février 1944: L'Affiche rouge (herodote.net)
- Missak Manouchian (netarmenie.com)
- Missak Manouchian - Ein armenischer Partisan
- Song performed by Léo Ferré (Daily Motion)
- "Vingt et trois étrangers et nos frères pourtant" in L'HumanitéL'HumanitéL'Humanité , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party , was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International...
, 21 February 2004 - Interview of Henri Karayan, former member of the Manouchian Group in L'HumanitéL'HumanitéL'Humanité , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party , was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International...
, 21 February 2004 - Julien Lauprêtre : "Manouchian était dans ma cellule… et je ne le savais pas" in L'HumanitéL'HumanitéL'Humanité , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party , was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International...
, 21 February 2004 - Rino Della Negra, ailier droit résistant, article on one of the member of the Manuchian Group, in L'HumanitéL'HumanitéL'Humanité , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party , was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International...
, 21 February 2004 - Les nouvelles censures Par Pascal Convert Sculpteur, plasticien, concepteur du monument à la mémoire des résistants et otages fusillés au Mont Valérien, auteur du documentaire Mont-Valérien, aux noms des fusillés. in L'HumanitéL'HumanitéL'Humanité , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party , was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International...
, 21 February 2004 - Présentation en avant-première du nouveau hors-série de l’Humanité