Paris has one of the largest Armenians communities in France.

The Louvre has an ancient Armenian khachkar in it's collection.

King Levon VI (1342-1393), the last king of Cilicia (Lesser Armenia) is buried at St. Dennis Cathedral, along with the French royalty.

The Birth of a Community

by Jean-Claude Kebabdjian

Paris — An Armenian-style church at Germigny-des-PrËs south of Pithiviers on the River Loire, lost like a lonely jewel in the depths of France, is one of the examples of early contacts between the French and Armenian people dating back to between the 10th and 12th centuries.

Religious contacts were established during this period and these are documented in the country’s oldest historical records. The French were in no doubt, even way back, that Armenians would play an important role in the future.

The Crusaders were a glorious turning point. Political and commercial links flourished between the French and Armenians. First of all there were blood ties, stretching right up to almost the royal palaces. The last Regent of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia , Leon VI of Lusignan, of French stock, died in 1393 in Paris and was buried at the Saint Denis Basilica just to the north of the French capital.

After that, Cardinal Richelieu and Colbert helped the Armenians set up trading posts.

History was to gather pace and the skies were to darken. The era of the Genocide dawned, the French sometimes present, and sometimes not. After the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the French authorities needed workers. The Armenian refugees and orphans crammed into Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon, arrived by the boatloads to Marseilles and journeyed to the mines and factories around Marseilles, Valence, Grenoble, Lyons and Paris.

There, a quarter of a million Armenians settled down into tight little communities of between 2,000 and 4,000 people. The foundations of theArmenian community in France had been set.

The Armenian immigrants who arrived between 1920-30 fought and died for France on the battlefields of World War II and in the Resistance during the occupation by Nazi Germany. They paid the price for their assimilation and integration.

Their offspring, the first generation Armenians born in France, provided many celebrities like the singer Charles Aznavour and the film director Henri Verneuil, both the sons of refugees, or later still, world Formula One driving champion Alain Prost, whose father was Armenian.

Armenian refugees were also prominent in the arts. Paris is full of faded memories of artists famous in their days, entertainers who graced the prestigious stages of the French capital. Alice Sapritch, GrÈgoire Aslan and Jacques Helian are only a few of them.

French-Armenian ties were preserved and consolidated over the years. Thousands of new immigrants who arrived after the troubles in Turkey (in 1956), Lebanon (in 1975) and Iran (in 1979) comprised the next wave of immigration. Today, many youngsters who are the product of this movement are completing their studies in France, setting up Armenian households and sending their children to Armenian language schools.

Faced with the growing demand and the awakening of cultural identity, the future looks bright.

The Armenian General Benevolent Union, established in 1906, and its founder Boghos Nubar moved in 1921 to Paris, the diplomatic and political hub of the Armenian Question. AGBU chapters were set up in Paris, Lyon, Valence, Marseilles and Nice.

The Armenian Social Aid Association, operating Armenian retirement homes, was founded before this period and is unique to France. National institutions, and first and foremost the Armenian Church of Paris founded in 1905, were very soon to co-exist in Paris, playing a fundamental role in defending and protecting the refugees.

Today, Armenian classes are organized in many localities with full bilingual kindergartens and primary schools near Paris and Marseilles attended by several thousand children and youths. Armenian is currently a valid option counting toward the Baccalaureate, the French High School certificate.

In 1983, the bloody attack at the Paris Orly airport, blamed on a badly divided Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), raised a public outcry. Unlike the Orly attack, the occupation of the Turkish Consulate in Paris in 1981 was enthusiastically supported by young and old, and by all shades of public opinion.

The campaign to pass the resolution condemning the Armenian Genocide at the European Council unleashed on June 19, 1987 at Strasbourg a demonstration rare in its emotional intensity.

The earthquake on December 7, 1988 in Armenia and the huge mobilization of the French Armenian community in aid of the victims served not only to underline how numerous they were, but also proved that contrary to what was thought, they did care. The exhaustive effort made by French Armenians to provide humanitarian and logistical aid to the quake victims was probably unprecedented.

The passage of time, despite some heart-rending tragedies along the way, has opened the doors to social and human progress which is at once powerful and worthy. Successive waves of immigrants have brought with them their own contributions. The Armenian legacy can be found in trade, industry, science, fashion and the arts.

A lot has changed since the first Armenians arrived in France. They have rapidly become an extremely dynamic economic, social and intellectual component of French society.

After the fall of Cilicia, Armenian refugees arrived in Bruges where they were supported by a number of Flemish Christian charities. In 1478 Armenians built a large hostel in Bruges which became the "Armenian Hospice." By the end of that century Armenians began to move to Amsterdam, the new center of commerce in the region. Dutch sources record Armenian merchants selling pearls and diamonds there in the second half of the sixteenth century. Armenian commerce in Amsterdam received a major boost when Armenian merchants from Iran began trading in Western Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. Dutch merchants went to Isfahan and some even settled in New Julfa, while Armenians opened trading houses in Amsterdam. The first Armenian Bible was printed in 1666 in that city, by Voskan Vardapet. Armenians from Amsterdam also introduced the first printing press to Iran.

Soon after the conclusion of a trade treaty between the Turks and the Dutch in 1612, Armenian merchants from the Ottoman Empire arrived in Amsterdam. Silk was the primary item traded by the Armenians there, as in the rest of Europe, and they continued to control the Dutch silk trade until the mid-eighteenth century. According to Dutch sources there were some 500 Armenians living in Amsterdam, concentrated in the Monnikenstraat, Dykstraat, and Keiserstraat streets and selling their wares in the Qoster ("Eastern") Market.

In 1713 the Armenians constructed an Armenian Church in Amsterdam and received permission from Etchmiadzin to have their own priest. A number of Armenian merchants were wealthy enough to have their own ships flying the Dutch colours and to be escorted by armed frigates on their journeys to Smyrna. A hundred years later, however, due to various European conflicts, particularly the blockade enforced during the Napoleonic wars, as well as the rise of English trading companies, the Armenian community had lost its economic power in the Netherlands. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Armenian church of Amsterdam was closed down and eventually sold.

By the end of the nineteenth century most of the Armenian communities in Europe had reached the low ebb of their social and economic influence in their adopted lands. No one could predict that cataclysmic events at the end of that century and the first two decades of the twentieth would bring new, and very different, Armenian immigrants to the shores of Eastern and Western Europe.

The Armenian communities of Belgium and Holland experienced Europe's world wars firsthand. During the First World War, many Armenians, who were still Turkish citizens, left Belgium for Holland to escape the German onslaught and from fear of being sent back to Turkey to be drafted. Most returned after the war and a chair in Armenian studies was established in the University of Brussels in 1931, with the famed professor Nicholas Adontz as its first chair holder.

The community in Holland had all but disappeared, when it got a minor influx from the Armenians who had left Dutch Indonesia in the 1950s after the nationalist government took over there. More Armenians came to Holland from Iran, Turkey and Lebanon in the 1980s and eventually managed to repurchase the Armenian church in Amsterdam, which had been closed in the 1850s. Although barely 10,000 strong, the Armenian communities of Belgium and Holland are culturally active.

Source: A History of the Armenian People Volume II
By: George A. Bournoutian