On March 24, 2025, La Poste issues a stamp on the Chasseneuil-sur-Bonnieure Resistance Memorial built from 1945, eighty years ago. It contains 2,255 graves of combatants.
On a hill overlooking the small town of Chasseneuil-sur-Bonnieure, in the Charente department, stands a white monument more than twenty meters high that combines the "V" for Victory with the Cross of Lorraine. The work of the architect and former Charente resistance fighter François Poncelet, the Chasseneuil Resistance Memorial pays tribute to the combatants shot by the Nazis or who fell on the field of honor while fighting against the occupier. Construction of the memorial began in 1945 on the initiative of Colonel Chabanne and the future senator-mayor of Chasseneuil Guy Pascaud, surviving members of the Bir Hacheim maquis: it was in 1943 that Claude Bonnier gave this name to all the maquis of Charente that he had just reorganized, in homage to the heroic fight of the allied forces against the Germans during the battle of Bir Hakeim in May-June 1942. The monument stands opposite the Cherves-Châtelars forest, which sheltered the Bir Hacheim maquis during the Second World War. Inaugurated on October 21, 1951 by the President of the Republic Vincent Auriol, the Chasseneuil-sur-Bonnieure memorial is surrounded by a military cemetery that extends over two hectares. This national necropolis does not only house the remains of the resistance fighters of the Charente maquis: there are in total 2,255 graves of fighters who died for France who line up their white crosses at the foot of the monument. The memorial thus preserves the memory of the martyrs of the Bir Hacheim maquis, but also more broadly that of the colonial soldiers who fell during the French campaign in 1940, as well as the resistance fighters from other regions whose bodies had initially been scattered in different cemeteries of the great South-West.
Beyond the Charente maquis, it is the entire French Resistance that is thus honored.
