President Emmanuel Macron will travel to the Vercors Alpine massif, the center of French resistance against Nazism, on April 16 to open commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy.
This trip will open an “extensive program” consisting of thousands of “local events” or “national or international in scope,” Mr. Macron said in a video on Wednesday, leaving open the question of a Russian presence in the context of the war in the Ukraine.
After the commemoration of the Vercors resistance fighters, the head of state will pay a first tribute to the Allied paratroopers on June 5th in Plumelec (Brittany, West) and Saint-Lô (West Normandy).
The next day, Emmanuel Macron will preside over a British, American and Canadian ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, surrounded by veterans, including 200 expected from abroad and “some French survivors,” according to the Élysée.
Given the decisive role of the USSR in the victory against Nazism, the question of a Russian delegation is being examined, the presidency also announced, when Vladimir Putin was present at the 70th anniversary of the landings.
However, he was absent five years ago and the war in Ukraine acutely raises the question of joint historical commemorations with Moscow.
Mr Macron will also travel in June to Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane in the southwest, scenes of Nazi abuses at the end of the war.
On June 18th, the traditional homage to the call to resistance launched by General de Gaulle on the radio from London in 1940 will take place at the Mont-Valérien Resistance memorial near Paris and on the Ile de Sein in Brittany.
The year 2024 must celebrate “the courage of our liberators, resistance fighters, soldiers of allied countries, fighters of the army reconstituted by Free France on the African continent,” including “many from Africa, the Pacific or all over the world,” declared the President of the Republic in his video.
The national day parade on July 14th in Paris must “evoke the universality of the values of those who liberated the country”.
Eighty years after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, a “popular event” is taking place around Place Denfert-Rochereau, where the headquarters of the Paris Resistance was established.