En 1989, as a young normalien, I had been invited by the sociology laboratory to go and survey the town of Ivry-sur-Seine. With my partner from the School, Éliette Abécassis, we had therefore, for example, attended the meetings of the CP confronted with the fall of the Wall. A shock with reality for the above-ground intellectuals that we were. On the other hand, we had evaded the large cemetery on the avenue de Verdun, where, I did not know, many of the Communists of the Second World War, the FTP-MOI (snipers and partisans-immigrant labor ) of the Red Poster and the Manouchian group in particular. Thirty-three years later, here I am again in Ivry.
Marie-Christine Penin, a historian passionate about cemeteries who maintains a remarkable site tombes-sepultures.com,…