Pantheon: “big women” come out of shadow over a storytelling ride

Three artists of the Word offer in the evening, until September 28, to explore the resistants, famous and anonymous, at the top of the Parisian monument.

by

If the names of Lucie Aubrac, Joséphine Baker, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion, among others, are not unknown to you, you may have never heard of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Blanche Paugam, Paulette Sarcey, Nancy Wake… All are common to have fought in the ranks of the Resistance during the Second World War. These “forgotten of history” have nothing to envy in terms of bravery and commitment to their male counterparts.

For the third edition of the Pantheon programming called “An evening in the heights”, Ariane Pawin, Fred Pougeard and Christian Tardif have chosen to highlight the stories of the exploits of this “feminine shadows”. Skillfully mixing historical reality and fiction, they imagine for the occasion transformed into DPLG spectrologists (“graduates by the government”) responsible for a mission of the utmost importance: to explain why, since November 30, 2021, date of the ‘Entrance of Joséphine Baker to the Pantheon, the night guards of the Parisian monument noticed an upheaval of the polarity of the place between the top and the bottom.

heroines of the daily

Richly nourished by an in-depth research in various historical works on the Second World War and by testimonies of resistant, famous and anonymous, this original storytelling walk has the visitors to the pantheon nave (deserted at this late hour) Up to top of the dome (35 meters high). The 360 ​​-degree panoramic view of Paris is worth, with the 206 stone and iron steps to climb to reach it.

The three storytellers are moving moments of break in this ascent and taking turns to narrate the feats of arms of these daily heroines, like Blanche Paugam (1898-1945), the first French woman condemned to death by the Germans for Acts of resistance, in 1940-she had cut electric cables in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in Pas-de-Calais (at her trial, she simply declared: “I cut 36. I would have cut more Still if I had been able to do it “), her sentence was commissioned in forced work, she died in deportation in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen (Basse-Saxe). Or like the German Marianne Cohn (1922-1944) made famous by her poem I will betray tomorrow, written in 1943 during his incarceration in France.

You have 20.87% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.

/Media reports.