Swiss nationals recount planting of Vietnam flag atop Notre Dame Cathedral Paris

The three young Swiss citizens - Bernard Bachelard, Olivier Parriaux, and Noé Graff—expressed their support for Vietnam by traveling from their country to France for the act on January 19, 1969, when the negotiations on peace for Vietnam began.

Two of them, Bachelard and Parriaux, now in their 80s, who are in their first visit to Vietnam, recounted the event.

At that time, Bernard Bachelard (a 26-year-old physical education teacher), Noé Graff (a 24-year-old law student), and Olivier Parriaux (a 25-year-old physics student) had been strongly engaging in the movements protesting the wars waged by the US and France in Vietnam.

According to Parriaux, as soon as then US President Lyndon Johnson declared to halt bombing in North Vietnam and expressed the readiness for negotiations, the three Swiss realised that the talks in Paris from January 18, 1969, would be a special event leading to the international recognition of the front set up nine years before that.

To celebrate the negotiations in an impressive way, they decided to select a high location, not the Eiffel Tower but a highly humane place respected by the whole world, and that was Notre Dame Cathedral Paris.

Parriaux made the plan, Graff was in charge of driving and guarding, and Bachelard with support from Parriaux was the one who climbed to the spire to fly the flag.

This action required thorough preparations since they were not Parisians and didn’t know how to reach the spire, Parriaux recounted, noting that they reached Paris around noon of Saturday January 18, 1969.

Bachelard and Parriaux hid themselves in the cathedral’s bell tower and waited to the evening when they moved to the spire while Graff was standing guard. They also had to cut some iron bars to prevent firefighters from accessing and ensure the flag would stay on the spire long enough so that people could see it the next day, on Sunday January 19.

All their action took place in 30 hours, and before returning home, they dropped by the headquarters of the Le Monde daily to send a communiqué of their action.

It was not until 3pm on January 19 that the flag of the front was removed by a Paris firefighting team which had to use a helicopter for the first time to perform a mission then.

The flag planting became a hot topic for international media at that time, Parriaux said, adding they were satisfied with the influence of this event while nobody knew they had made it. The three kept the truth about this event for 50 years.

No one knew who those people were until 2023, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Paris Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam (Paris Peace Accords), the identities of the flag-raisers were revealed through a book titled “Le Viet Cong au sommet de Notre-Dame” (The Viet Cong atop Notre Dame), which they themselves wrote and published. The book tells the story with full emotion about the courageous act they carried out when they were young men in their twenties.