Title: War Losses (France) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)
Headings: War Losses (France)
Version 1.0
Last updated 08 October 2014
War Losses (France)
War losses: an issue in the global assessment of the war ↑
Assessing military and civilian casualties: Policy regarding how to handle military casualties ↑
The delicate management of the number of troops ↑
Table 1: French military war losses 1914-1918
Order not to communicate the figures ↑
Civilian losses due to the war ↑
What was symbolically and materially at stake with war casualties? ↑
“Dead for France”: the right to compensation ↑
Working towards national recognition ↑
Important disparities between the various categories of soldiers ↑
Bereavement ↑
The power of the veterans as a social category ↑
Identity at stake from the interwar period until today ↑
Reassessing the impact of civilian dead on the population ↑
Notes
Citation
License
Metadata
Map
Images
Corpses of French front soldiers, 1917
Related Articles
Resources
RDF/XML

Content: War Losses (France) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)

Version 1.0
|
Last updated 08 October 2014
War Losses (France)
By Alexandre Lafon
PDF EPUB KINDLE Print
When the fighting came to an end in late 1918, military losses for France were in keeping with a prolonged industrial conflict involving the loss of a huge number of combatants on extremely deadly battlefields. In this context, the way the state handled the casualties, both in actual as well as symbolic terms, rapidly proved difficult yet necessary. Coverage concerning how the state reacted in the aftermath of the war was subject to manipulation and censorship. In the years that followed the war, public and private memories focused on the final casualty count of 1,400,000 persons. This number contributed to the crystallization of tensions related to national identity. Recent research has reevaluated the number of civilian casualties resulting from the war. Though the number of civilian casualties is not as high as the number of military casualties, the recently revealed high number of civilian deaths does serve to enhance the weight of bereavement and trauma within the communities affected, thus leaving an even deeper mark on the already diverse memories of the conflict. War losses: an issue in the global assessment of the war ↑
Despite intensive research by historians, there does not exist - and there will never exist - a final exact count of the casualties inflicted throughout World War I. We can only provide an estimate about military deaths, estimated to be in the range of around 10 million according to the highest estimates. This estimated body count hints at the drama lived by the societies who were engaged in the war and points to the brutal transition towards an industrialized mass war.