France’s new heroes

Four large portraits hang between the tall columns of the Panthéon that strides Paris’s Latin Quarters — sketched in black are two women and two men. As you walk closer to the huge domed building, the gold letterings carved on the facade catches the eye: Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante (“To the great men, a grateful fatherland”).  The highest honour that France can bestow on its citizens is a place in this sepulchral monument. Yet, until quite recently, it adhered strictly to the words of its motto, and held the tomb of only one woman out of the 73 most distinguished citizens interred there.   

In a symbolic move towards equality — one of the cornerstones of the legendary national motto, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”— two women of the Resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940s were honoured with burial in the Pantheon to represent heroic French resistance against extremist violence. Both women had worked in France’s intelligence networks, had been arrested and deported to Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women during World War II in north Germany, and confined in isolation.

On May 27, 2015, the French president Francois Hollande honoured four resistance  fighters,  two among them  whom were women: Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion, both of whom survived the war and went on to work for transforming society. The two men, Pierre Brossolette and Jean Zay met with death during the war. These four men and women embodied the values of courage, determination and a thirst for justice that the French pride themselves on. President Hollande lauded the spirit of the Resistance and warned that indifference was “today’s enemy”. 

The only woman to have earlier entered the Panthéon of “great men” is the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Mme Marie Curie for her path-breaking work on radioactivity. This is was possible after a law in early 1900s allowed women to be commemorated as well.   Sophie Berthelot, a chemist, is also interred in the mausoleum, but only because her husband, the chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot explicitly wished not to be separated from his wife after death. Among the men are writers Victor Hugo and Alexendra Dumas, and the philosophers, Voltaire and Rousseau. 

Although a substantial number of women ministers constitute President Hollande’s government, the tendency to ignore women’s contribution to society has irked a section of French citizens. Many argue the flagrant absence of women in the Panthéon reflects the lack of recognition of women today. For years, the feminist groups in France have demanded that women, too, be pantheonised. In August 2013, feminist organisations, including the La Barbe demonstrated in front of the Panthéon, wearing fake beards to mock the patriarchal system. They held up posters of five women to even up women’s representation in the mausoleum. Shouting slogans like “Only Pants at the Panthéon!” and ridiculing the notion that “genius is only masculine”, one of the speakers at the march eloquently summed it up: “What does it say about society when you ignore women of the past? It is highly likely we will ignore women today.”  

Among the women the feminists had shortlisted was the resistance fighter Germain Tillion. Tillion had described life in the Ravensbruck concentration camp as  “a world of horror that was a world of contradictions: more terrifying than the visions of Dante, more absurd than a game of snakes and ladders.” An anthropologist, she wrote sensitively about the Berbers of North Africa, saying her work saved her from her concentration camp experience, and strongly opposed torture by the French during the Algerian war. She died in 2008, aged 100.

Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was 20 during the Nazi occupation and joined the resistance movement. She described coming close to death in Ravensbruck, traumatised by women who were killed around her. She was kept alive in isolation when the Germans realised she was the niece of Charles de Gaulle, hoping they could use her as a bait. Post-war, she dedicated her life to fighting poverty and campaigning for homeless people, shocked by the slums outside Paris. She died in 2002, aged 81.

Pierre Brossolette led several missions as an intelligence agent and became a resistance spokesman for the BBC. Arrested and tortured in 1944, he jumped to his death to avoid disclosing information. Before the war, Jean Zay was France’s education minister. He was arrested in Morocco where he had intended to form a resistance movement and continued to work from the prison. In 1944 he was murdered by French collaborationists.  

There is near unanimity in honouring people from the Resistance movement, the period of pride in France’s history. Understandably, there have been nation-wide debates on the changing ideas of greatness and controversy surrounding the selection of people. Whether France would consecrate activists fighting for the cause of women’s rights remains to be seen.

Some of the leading but controversial candidates proposed for the Panthéon is the proto- feminist Olympe de Gouges, an early opponent of slavery. She published The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791. Louise Michel, a militant feminist, joined the Paris Commune of 1871 and sided with indigenous residents who revolted against France. However, her association with anarchism has somewhat “dimmed her prospects”, many feel. 

For a long time, one of the most favoured candidates has been the Black American dancer, Josephine Baker, who worked for racial equality and adopted more than 10 children during the war. She took up French citizenship, worked quietly as an agent for the resistance, while enrapturing her audience wearing no more than a string of bananas. She later received many honours from the French government. 

The director of Centre for National Monuments, who had to produce a policy document to make the Panthéon more relevant to the people, was quoted in the media as saying: “The question of who to admit to the Pantheon has always been the source of enormous controversy. It is the most un-consensual of national monuments.”

In fact the monument has been mired in controversy since its origin. Consecrated as a church by Louis V, it was converted into a monument during the French Revolution. Today, many people in France continue to express dismay at the display of religious symbols on a secular monument, like the cross on top of the dome; while others think the cross should remain untouched, being part of the history of the monument. 

Not everyone may be keen to be consecrated with a burial at the Panthéon. Albert Camus’s family turned down the honour. Though the feminist, self-proclaimed atheist and writer Simone de Beauvoir is another favourite choice of French citizens, she herself may have baulked at the idea of being buried in the neoclassical mausoleum of religious symbols so overwhelmingly dominated by males than where she now lies by the side of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre in the serenity of their simple grave at the Montparnasse Cemetery. 

The author is a senior journalist based in Leipzig