Emmanuel Macron pays tribute to the “hero” Jean Isaac-Tresca, last resistant of the Glières maquis


The head of state paid tribute on Wednesday evening to the resistance fighter who died on April 3 at the age of 104. A guerrilla, he took part in the fierce fighting on the Haut-Savoyard plateau surrounded by the German army and the French militia in the spring of 1944.

“Live Free or Die.” From the French Revolution, the guerrillas of Glières, a mountainous plateau in Haute-Savoie, had drawn their motto. Of this handful of young people, Emmanuel Macron had already, during the 75th anniversary of the fighting on the Glières plateau, narrated “the sublime and tragic epic”. On Wednesday evening, he paid tribute to the last of them, Jean Isaac-Tresca, who died on April 3 at the age of 104. In a statement, the Head of State honored a “Heroes of the Inner Resistance”.

Born in Lyon in 1918, grandson of a deputy and minister of the Third Republic, son of a deputy mayor of Lyon who fought in the First World War, Jean Isaac-Tresca joined the resistance at the age of 25. From 1941, the first mobilization networks were organized in Haute-Savoie. Weapons are dropped by the Allies. The guerrillas are responsible for receiving them. The creation by the Vichy government of the Compulsory Labor Service (STO) in 1943 prompted dozens of young men to swell the ranks of the network. They are soon joined by soldiers from the 27th battalion of Alpine hunters from Annecy, exiled Spanish Communists or Republicans. In the winter of 1944, there were nearly 460. Including Jean Isaac-Tresca, alias Pasquier. Living conditions are harsh. The cold, the lack of supplies, the fear of denunciations torment these young men. “The potatoes, in the end, we ate them raw”told the former resistant to West Francein 2019.

In the spring of 1944, the maquis was surrounded by nearly 5,000 men from the Wehrmacht and the French Militia, a paramilitary organization created in 1943 by Pétain. “From March 23, the men of Glières, already assailed by the cold, were also attacked by iron and fire”, underlines the Elysée in its press release. Surrounded three days later, some manage to escape. 129 of them died. Still others were tortured and then deported.

“Discreet hero and adorable uncle”

“We were inhabited by a patriotic spirit which, if I am severe, the youth of today cannot understand everythingtestified Jean Isaac-Tresca in 2019. I was no more than that attached to France. I knew how to sing the Marseillaise, but I did not have the fervor of those who left Groix or Sein by boat.” After the war, the one who will be decorated with the Legion of Honor will spend several years of his life in Japan, where he practiced his profession as an engineer.

On Twitter, several family members of Jean Isaac-Tresca paid tribute to him. The journalist from Figaro Anne-Emmanuelle Isaac greets a “discreet hero and lovable uncle”. The Modem deputy from the Rhône, Cyrille Isaac-Sibille, talks about “a warm, elegant and discreet man”. “Farewell dear uncle Jean Isaac-Tresca, said Pasquier, Glières fighter”also wrote the deputy director of the departmental editorial staff of the ParisianJean-Baptiste Isaac.

The Glières, they have entered into posterity. In 1973, André Malraux came to inaugurate the great white bird, work of the sculptor Emile Gilioli, symbol of heroism and freedom. For the fiftieth anniversary of the fighting on the Glières plateau in 1994, François Mitterrand will pay tribute “to those of you who have been companions, who have experienced this suffering, who bear honor today, who testify for history and who are still living symbols of a great action which marked the history of France”.





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