Vosges. A memorial dedicated to Jean Moulin inaugurated in the town where he witnessed the Armistice.

The moment is solemn this Saturday on the main street of Socourt, a town of about 280 souls, as officials pull back the veil covering a face that appears in every French history textbook. Carved from an iron structure, attached to the Cross of Lorraine and a few meters from a plaque retracing his life, Jean Moulin appears. "Almost 82 years after his death, we salute a hero by inaugurating this memorial," explains the mayor, Jean-Luc Martinet, as children have just read old letters from the man who, in his darkest hours, became a martyr of the Resistance.

Jean Moulin did not write these letters during the Second World War, but during the First, when he was stationed in the village for a few months in 1918, an anonymous soldier among many others housed in the homes of locals, as part of the great final offensive against Germany. "He and his comrades would escape it since the Armistice would be pronounced in the meantime. Jean Moulin was in Socourt and witnessed the return of soldiers from the front and prisoners. To what extent could this episode have shaped the unifier of the Resistance?"

Episodes that he recounts, along with other more anecdotal ones (football, fishing) in letters and postcards to loved ones.

Relatives in attendance, as Cécile Benoît-Escoffier, Jean Moulin's second cousin, and her husband Gilbert Benoît came to attend the event. "Five years ago, we contacted the mayor after discovering these letters mentioning the town. We met two years ago, and today marks the laying of a new stone on the memorial trail," they explained in this town, now a member of the Jean Moulin Towns Network association.