Inaugurated in 2015, the Memorial stands amid the barracks, relics and witnesses to the more than 60,000 people who passed through the camp over the decades. This is a unique space, reflecting the traumas of the twentieth century: the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the wars of decolonization.
The History of Camp de Rivesaltes
witness to three major conflicts
The Rivesaltes camp witnessed three major conflicts in France, Europe and North Africa in just three decades: the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the Algerian War.
During this period, the barracks of the Rivesaltes camp were home to thousands of men, women and children of different origins, cultures and nationalities.
The passage of these population groups to the Rivesaltes camp reflects the forced displacements resulting from these conflicts and the decolonization movements that shook the 20th century.
Initially built as a military training center, the camp was also an "accommodation center" for undesirable foreigners, an internment camp for victims of the Vichy regime's exclusion policy, a deportation camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Drancy, a German prisoner-of-war camp, a transit zone for the French army's foreign auxiliaries, and a "regroupment camp for Harkis and their families".
Its history is that of the Spanish Republicans, foreign Jews, Gypsies, Axis prisoners of war, Harkis, FLN prisoners, Guineans, North Vietnamese and all those who lived there in often very difficult conditions.
The "Undesirables" permanent exhibition
The permanent exhibition aims to convey the history of the camp. It also examines the themes that make up the history of this camp in the south of France, such as forced population movements, which continue on a massive scale today, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
There isn't just one Rivesaltes camp, but many: a camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War, a camp for Vichy "undesirables" during the Second World War, an assembly camp for Jews deported as part of the genocide, and a transit camp for harkis after the Algerian War.
To understand how the destinies of these men, women and children, forcibly displaced, arbitrarily interned or refugees, came together in the same place, the long central table traces the successive functions of this camp and the conditions of life in these endless islets. On the sides, six large panels set this story within the larger history of the 20th century, that of wars and violence against civilians. Four monumental films project onto the walls images of these men, women and children, whose testimonies can be heard on digital tablets on metal rods.
