Jean Moulin

Jean Moulin was a French civil servant dismissed by the Vichy regime in November 1940 who went on to unite the main Resistance networks and become the first president of the National Council of the Resistance in May 1943. The German authorities labelled resisters bandits and terrorists, argued that they fought illegally and had no rights, and could make them disappear under the Nacht und Nebel decree. On 21 June 1943 the German security service arrested Moulin at a meeting of Resistance leaders in Caluire-et-Cuire, near Lyon. He was held at Montluc prison and tortured under Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon. He died on 8 July 1943, in circumstances that remain uncertain: the German death certificate places his death near the Metz railway station, and some accounts say he died on a train to Germany.

On 19 December 1964 his ashes, thought to be his, were carried into the Panthéon in Paris. André Malraux's speech at the ceremony is widely regarded as one of the most famous in French history, and its opening words, which describe the funeral march of the ashes, are the quotation above.