For the inauguration of the namesake plaque on 25 October 2022, on the square of the Marracq college, many people came to greet the memory of the great man. Several dozen former establishment students, gathered in association, elected municipal officials and principals, former and current.
Jean-Léon Irigaray, Emeritus Professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and a member of the Bayonne High School Alumni Association, has long insisted on the character’s humanist, feminist and avant-garde personality. Humanist, when he hosted a student victim of a contagious disease in his family home in Baigorri, or when he took care of guiding his students and finding them a university room; feminist when she accepted diversity in the classroom at a time when she was still rare.
“The honest man of the twentieth century”
A former Bayonne high school student with a passion for history, Bernard Landrieu is back on Étienne Cabillon’s journey as a resistance fighter. “A little-known role, explains the 80-year-old, which helped to highlight his acts of courage. For the services rendered to France within the Talence network, Léon-Cabillon line – named after his brother, Étienne received la Croix de guerre alla Liberazione. However, as an honest man of the 20th century, he never showed this recognition. This cross appears on his grave, in the Saint-Étienne cemetery – where he was buried in 1987, but was late in the family that the family learned of this decoration. Within the Talence network, Étienne Cabillon was the connection that welcomed refugees, resistance fighters, refractory to the STO, allied aviators, who had managed to cross the Pyrenees via Saint-Etienne de Baigorry, Bidarrai and the crests of Iparla before reaching Madrid. It is here that he welcomed them, while he was stationed at the French school in Madrid, facilitating their transit to a safer destination or to co feel them to continue their struggle.
