Armenian Poet Enters Pantheon

A stateless Armenian poet who died fighting the Nazi occupation of France during World War II became the first non-French Resistance fighter to enter the Pantheon mausoleum for national heroes.

The honor to Missak Manouchian has been seen as long-overdue recognition of the bravery of foreign communists -- many Jewish -- who fought the Nazis alongside members of the French Resistance.

Members of the French foreign legion carried the coffins of Manouchian and his wife Melinee, also a member of the Resistance, draped in French flags into the secular temple.

The names of 23 of his communist comrades-in-arm -- including Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Romanian fighters -- will be added to a commemorative plaque inside the monument.

"Grateful France welcomes you," President Emmanuel Macron said.

Manouchian arrived in France as a young man in the mid-1920s, after fleeing World-War-I-era mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a child to French-mandate Lebanon.

He joined the French communist party's armed resistance in 1943, soon leading dozens of foreigners fighting the German occupiers in the Paris region.

Manouchian was arrested in November 1943 and tortured before being shot dead by firing squad aged 37 with around 20 of his comrades in February 1944.

Manouchian, who pursued poetry and literature while working in a shipyard and a factory before the war, had requested French nationality in 1933 and 1940, both times without success.

He was one of many foreigners in the French Resistance.

They were mostly "anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, Spanish Republicans who had fled Francoism, anti-fascist Italians, Poles who had fled anti-Semitism, Armenians, and Jews from eastern Europe and Germany", according to the French defence ministry.

It is unclear how many exactly of the 2.2 million foreigners in France at the time joined the Resistance.