The Museum of Resistance and Deportation will reopen its doors on September 8 after months of work at the heart of Besançon’s Vauban Castle. The creation of this reference museum on World War II dates back to 1971. It is a renewed museum that offers visitors a museum that renews itself as a citizen tool. The National Museum is located at the heart of a site that has long been a symbol of a defensive border and now embodies UNESCO’s values loud and clear: building peace by promoting cooperation between nations through education. , Science and Culture. Today’s border is a line of communication, an interface, a point of exchange. The palace and the museum doubly remind us that peace is an essential construct, but also a very fragile one.
The mission of the museum is to explain how a human society, ours, questioned the fundamental rights of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”. Children, women and men stripped of all their rights, their dignity, sent to death; It happened here, on our territories, in the heart of Europe!
At Besancon, we are proud to be a part of a nation whose duty it is to guarantee justice and the rule of law. It is our duty to bring history to life, to sensitize and resonate with our current events, and to stir conscience.
At Besançon, we wanted this reincarnation museum to be a tool for knowledge, exchange and reflection, reminding us of our duty to fight against the affront to human life.
In order to firmly defend the values of humanity and living together, we need to understand and prevent certain episodes in our history of hating others and the denial of humanistic values from repeating themselves. Current events in all European countries remind us of this: words, actions and movements based on racism or xenophobia must not be provoked.
This new protest museum continues its mission: to transmit history. It is organized around a curriculum that focuses on evoking the individuals, women and men, who have been immersed in war and their personal journeys, which form a puzzle piece of our collective history; Sometimes it emphasizes the central place of “words and languages,” used as powerful weapons in the dissemination of Nazi ideology, to which the underground press would respond during the Resistance. Finally, the museum will highlight an exceptional collection – unique in France and one of the largest in Europe – in new displays of exile art, thus testifying to the spiritual and creative resistance of exiles in a dehumanized universe. .
In Besançon on September 8, it will discuss the dignity of humanity, but also its failures. It is our ability to defend our values that reveals its weakness. And it is our responsibility to make it a fight. The new Resistance and Deportation Museum will be our weapon to “raise the security of peace in the minds of men.”
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“Avid gamer. Social media geek. Proud troublemaker. Thinker. Travel fan. Problem solver.”
– The Resistance Museum will reopen
Anne Mignot – Mayor of Besançon