Missak Manouchian

Missak Manouchian
Portrait kept in the German Federal Archives and reproduced on the Affiche Rouge
Born	(1906-09-01)1 September 1906 Adıyaman, Ottoman Empire
Died	21 February 1944(1944-02-21) (aged 37) Fort Mont-Valérien, Paris, Occupied France
Cause of death	Execution by firing squad
Resting place	, Ivry-sur-Seine
Other names	Michel Manouchian (francized)
Occupation	Trade unionist, poet, translator, political activist
Organization	FTP-MOI
Political party	French Communist Party (from 1934)
Movement	Labour movement, Anti-fascism, French Resistance
Spouse(s)	Mélinée (née Assadourian)

Missak Manouchian (Western Armenian: Միսաք Մանուշեան; pronounced [misɑkʰ manuʃjɑn], 1 September 1906 – 21 February 1944) was a French-Armenian poet and communist activist. An Armenian Genocide survivor, he moved to France from an orphanage in Lebanon in 1925. He was active in communist Armenian literary circles. During World War II, he became the military commissioner of FTP-MOI, a group consisting of European immigrants, including many Jews, in the Paris region which carried out assassinations and bombings of Nazi targets. According to one author, the Manouchian group was the most active French Resistance group. Manouchian and many of his comrades were arrested in November 1943 and executed by the Nazis in Fort Mont-Valérien on 21 February 1944. He is considered a hero of the French Resistance.

Manouchian was born on 1 September 1906 in Adıyaman, in Mamuret-ul-Aziz Vilayet, Ottoman Empire into an Armenian peasant family. His parents were killed during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, but he and his brother managed to survive. In the early 1920s he settled in an Armenian General Benevolent Union-run orphanage in Jounieh, Lebanon, then a French protectorate. He acquired education there and in 1925 moved to France.

Eventually, Manouchian settled in Paris, where he took a job as a lathe operator at a Citroën plant. During this period he was self-educated and often visited libraries in the Latin Quarter. He joined the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT), a national association of trade unions which was the first of the five major French confederations. In the early 1930s, when the world-wide economic crisis of the Great Depression set in, Missak Manouchian lost his job. Disaffected with capitalism, he began earning a meager living by posing as a model for sculptors.