From the attacks of 2015 to the capitulation of Germany, from the inauguration of the Palais Garnier to the death of Joséphine Baker, the year 2025 is rich in commemorations.
Faced with a year ahead full of uncertainties, one thing remains unchanged: France's taste for commemorations and tributes. And the year 2025 will offer its share of significant dates, from the end of the Second World War to the attacks of 2015. The official calendar established by the Institut de France and its dedicated service, France Mémoire, goes back even further and chooses to distinguish the writer Honoré d'Urfé, who died 400 years ago, or the astronomer Cassini who died the same year. But many other personalities and many events can be recalled to our memory, in France and elsewhere. Also a way of deciphering today's world.
The vivid memory of the 2015 attacks
The first days of 2025 will thus be devoted to the still vivid and painful memory of the attack against Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015 followed by the assassination of the municipal police officer of Montrouge, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, and the attack on Hyper hide from the Porte de Vincennes. After the official ceremonies, Charlie Hebdo and the Crif (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) will organize an evening of debates and joint tribute on January 9 at the Mutualité de Paris for “rediscover the spirit of the demonstration of January 11, 2015”which brought together nearly 4 million people throughout the country, underlines the press release. At the end of the year, the victims of the attacks of November 13, on the Parisian terraces, at the Bataclan and the Stade de France, will in turn be honored.
But terrorism has struck France numerous times. The year 2025 also marks the 30th anniversary of the wave of attacks in 1995 attributed to the Algerian Islamic Group (GIA). On July 25, at the Saint-Michel RER station in Paris, a bomb exploded, killing eight people and injuring around a hundred passengers.
80th anniversary of the end of the war
The same year, a terrorist attack using an unprecedented method sowed terror. In Japan, members of the Aum sect spread sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, poisoning thousands of people and killing 13 passengers. But this year Japan will remember another tragedy: the atomic bombings of August 6 and 9, 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because 2025 also marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
After the ceremonies celebrating the Normandy landings in 2024 and then the liberation of Paris, May 8 will revive the memory of the capitulation of Nazi Germany. This year is the opportunity to look at the momentous events of 1945: the Yalta conference in February, the Potsdam conference in July, the founding of the UN in October and the opening of the Nuremberg trials in November. Starting in January, several heads of state will travel to Poland to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz camp by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. A ceremony hit by current events because Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu under arrest warrant from the ICC, could be absent according to a Polish media just like Vladimir Putin who has been excluded for three years due to the war in Ukraine.
Artists and scientists
But the memory exercise is not always so serious and upsetting. It often serves to bring illustrious personalities back into the news. From January 5, the Palais Garnier, temple of the Paris Opera, celebrates 150 years of its inauguration. Its architect, Charles Garnier, would have celebrated his 200th birthday on November 6. Celebrated in 2021 for her entry into the Pantheon, Joséphine Baker will still be honored for the 50th anniversary of her death in 1975, just like the comedian Pierre Dac, who died the same year, and also a figure of the Resistance, notes the Institute of France. We can add to the list of those who disappeared in 1975: Michel Simon, Dmitri Shostakovich, Saint-John Perse, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Hannah Arendt. Ten years earlier, Winston Churchill and Le Corbusier died. And in 1955, the world mourned Paul Claudel, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and James Dean.
This year will finally mark the centenary of the cyclist Louison Bobet, the composer Pierre Boulez, the writer Jean d'Ormesson, the psychiatrist and essayist Frantz Fanon, the writer and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, the architect Andrée Putman and the tournament of Roland Garros. And last but not leastwe will not forget to point out the 250th anniversary of the English writer Jane Austen born on December 16, 1775. Notice to fans.
