Mémorial de la France combattante, French resistance monument in Suresnes, France

The Mémorial de la France combattante is a monument in Suresnes that combines sculpture and architecture on a substantial scale. A large stone cross stands at its center, surrounded by bronze figures and relief work set into a pink-hued wall.

On 11 November 1945, fifteen fighters from France and the colonies, including Berty Albrecht and Renée Lévy, were buried in a temporary crypt at the fort. In 1958 de Gaulle charged Félix Brunau with building a monument, inaugurated on 18 June 1960; the coffins were moved into the new crypt the night before. The body of Edmond Grethen, a resistance fighter shot by the Japanese in Indochina, was placed there in 1952.

The sixteen bronze high-reliefs along the wall, by sixteen different sculptors, stand in for Greek metopes and show the phases, places and branches of the fight for Liberation. Each 18 June, the chancellerie de l'ordre de la Libération holds a ceremony here marking de Gaulle's 1940 appeal, as decreed in 2006. The esplanade is named Place Abbé Franz Stock, the chaplain who recorded executions in his diary.

The monument faces a paved esplanade of over 10,000 m², named Place Abbé Franz Stock after the priest who recorded executions in his diary. Two bronze doors sit under the Cross of Lorraine: one opens onto the burial crypt cut into the rock, the other onto the stairway to the remembrance path. An information centre built from 2008 and open since 2009 stands at the end of the alley left of the monument and runs guided tours of the memorial trail inside the fortress.

The remembrance path, opened in 1962 by Minister of Veterans Affairs Raymond Triboulet, follows the route the condemned took from the chapel, where the execution poles are kept, down to the clearing. Its layout was meant to reconcile the Gaullist and Communist readings of the Resistance.