Mélinée Manouchian (b. Constantinople, 1913 – d. 1989, Fleury-Mérogis, France) was a French-Armenian résistante and the widow of Missak Manouchian. During the Armenian genocide, she lost her parents and was taken, along with her elder sister, to a Protestant orphanage in Smyrne. She then moved to Corinth, Greece. After 1926, she lived in Marseilles, France, where she learned French and studied accounting. She met her future husband, Missak Manouchian, in 1934. In 1935, she became secretary of the Armenian Relief Committee. She was in close contact with Charles Aznavour’s family. During the French Resistance, she became a heroic companion to her husband. From the early 1940s, she regularly made, copied, and distributed forbidden anti-fascist literature. When Missak was arrested for the first time, she asked Micha Aznavourian to take her to the camp at Compiègne on his bicycle. She succeeded in passing some food to her husband and even visited him for a second. After the last arrest of Missak, she was sentenced to death in absentia, but was hidden and saved by the Aznavourians. After World War II, she lived and worked in Yerevan, then in the 1960s, she returned to Paris. In 1954, she wrote her memoirs about Missak.
