This commitment was formalized in November 2023 with the creation of a network of places of history and remembrance of the Second World War in Seine-Saint-Denis, with the support of the Shoah Memorial and the Musée de la Résistance Nationale.
The northeastern suburbs of Paris, today's Seine-Saint-Denis, owe it to history and geography alone to preserve the traces of the main internment and transit camp for French Jews, Drancy, the two main deportation stations for French Jews, Le Bourget-Drancy and Bobigny, as well as the Fort de Romainville camp in Les Lilas and the Quai aux bestiaux in Pantin, two major sites for the repression and deportation of Resistance fighters. And yet, historically, it's impossible not to link them with Paris's northern and eastern railway stations, as well as Compiègne-Royallieu, Mont Valérien, Paris prisons and Fresnes... History and memories intertwine and intersect, as do the networks of repression and persecution policies, regardless of the administrative boundaries of a Gross Paris enlarged to include the Oise and Loiret regions in the 1940s and the Île-de-France of the 21st century, more than eighty years later.
The historical understanding of these places of remembrance is intended to gradually extend the network to the regional level. Indeed, it has already been designed with all its partners on the scale of the Paris region of the 1940s, which, at the instigation of the Nazi occupiers, included Compiègne-Royallieu in the Oise department to the north, and Beaune-La-Rolande and Pithiviers in the Loiret department to the south, for the repression of the Resistance and persecution of French Jews, as well as their respective deportations.
Regional, but also national and European from a historical point of view, this network aims above all to coordinate and promote preserved historical sites. Its main ambition is scientific and educational, aimed at schoolchildren and the general public, but also at tourism, for a demanding memorial tourism.
The main function of this website is to reflect this desire and to materialize the network in both its historical and contemporary dimensions, and to promote dialogue and interaction between the two, for a better understanding of this history, focusing on the Resistance, the Shoah and the deportations. This network is intended to evolve, and is still under construction.
This website was designed by the Département de la Seine-Saint-Denis with the support of Seine-Saint-Denis tourisme and the SNCF.
The project Mémoires en réseau, Résistance, Shoah et déportations en Seine-Saint-Denis (Networked memories, Resistance, Holocaust and deportations in Seine-Saint-Denis) is run with the support of the French Ministry of Culture, the Île de France Regional Department of Cultural Affairs, the French Ministry of Education, through the involvement of the DSD. through the involvement of the DSDEN of Seine-Saint-Denis, the Ministry of Defense with the commitment of the Office national des anciens combattants et des victimes de guerre de Seine-Saint-Denis and the Direction de la mémoire, de la culture et des archives, the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Secrétariat d'État aux anciens combattants.
