After the camps and the slums, honors for Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz

It is only a few handfuls of earth that make their way into the Pantheon. Taken from the Bossey cemetery (Haute-Savoie) and placed in a coffin. The remains of Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz still rest, alongside her husband, in the Savoyard village.

« She probably would not have appreciated her own pantheonization given her humble and discreet character », Estimates historian Frédérique Neau-Dufour, specialist in the Second World War. His descendants did not want his body to be exhumed and moved to Paris.

A strong symbol of the role of women in the resistance

But no matter, François Hollande, on May 27, 2015, decided to bring four resistance fighters into the Pantheon. Two men, after Félix Éboué in 1949, Jean Moulin in 1964, René Cassin in 1987, Jean Monnet in 1988 and André Malraux in 1996. And two women, the very first resistance fighters to access the republican temple.

With the radical Jean Zay and the socialist Pierre Brossolette, Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz thus come to represent and symbolize the considerable part played by women in the resistance against Vichy and the Nazis.

The President of the Republic then believes that he has brought the Resistance in all its political components into the Pantheon. However, there is one missing, and a big one: the doors of the temple remain closed to the communists, who nevertheless have the largest number of people shot…

But François Hollande remains deaf to calls to pantheonize Missak Manouchian and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, including when the artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, responsible for drawing four gigantic portraits of the four honored resistance fighters, whispers to him that he also created the one of Manouchian (which will finally enter in 2024).

She began to resist from Pétain's speech on June 17, 1940.

Despite this gaping lack, the ceremony was dignified. And at the height of the career of Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz. In 1940, she lived in Rennes, left her house, tore down a flag with a swastika hanging from a bridge. “She had a knee-jerk, immediate and instinctive reaction when she heard Pétain's call, on June 17, and began to resist from that moment on”this while she is still a student and only 20 years old, says Frédérique Neau-Dufour.

The young girl joins her aunt in Paris, and together they broadcast photos of General de Gaulle, her uncle, of whom she “is not dependent, but both have mutual admiration for their commitment”explains the historian.

The young woman also participates in the distribution of the underground newspaper Defense of France. According to the historian, she was, at the time, the only woman to have anonymously signed articles there. Denounced and arrested by the Gestapo, she was deported in February 1944 to the German camp of Ravensbrück.

“Should I prepare to die? »

Humiliated, starved and beaten, she bears witness to the horror in her work crossing the night and recounts having asked herself this way, during the ordeal: “Should I prepare to die? » Placed in solitary confinement, including four months in a bunker without light, Charles de Gaulle's niece served as a bargaining chip and only left Ravensbrück with the help of negotiations from the International Red Cross in February 1945. .

After her liberation, the vision of the camp reappears to her even though she is far from German lands. In the slum of Noisy-le-Grand, a chaplain, Joseph Wresinski, founder of the ATD Fourth World movement, shows him what extreme poverty is.

Same visceral reaction as for the horror of the camps. “She always said: 'For the 250 families who lived there, I felt the same inhumanity as what I experienced in Ravensbrück'”remembers Marie-Aleth Grard, the current president of the movement.

The first woman to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor

So, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz entered into resistance again, against poverty this time, and left her post in the cabinet of André Malraux, at the time Minister of Cultural Affairs. She joined ATD Fourth World, where she chaired the French branch from 1964 to 1998.

“She spared no effort”story Marie-Aleth Grard, sometimes visiting the makeshift camps sometimes speaking at the National Assembly to defend the “guidance law relating to the fight against exclusion”, promulgated in July 1998. That same year, she is the first woman to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.

In December 1999, she attended the presentation of this same distinction to her resistance friend Germaine Tillion, with whom she was deported to Ravensbrück. She gives a speech to him: “There is another thing that you taught us, (…) it is the recognition of the value and dignity of each human being. » This without knowing that, sixteen years later, they will both be honored together in the Pantheon.