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 ↑
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Corpses of French front soldiers, 1917
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Content: This approximate figure also reveals the difficulty encountered in attempting to count the number of dead, and in defining precisely what is meant by war casualties when conducting a global assessment of the war. It raises the question of how the different societies engaged in the war decided how are the dead numbered during the conflict. This is a central issue, which affects the construction and used of war statistics within the nations after the war. Beyond the mere count of the casualties affected, this issue is part of a larger quantitative approach to studying the conflict. Quantitative approaches question the way in which the war was conducted and why reparations were required from Germany when the peace treaties were signed. It also probes why it was so difficult for those who were advocating for a fair peace settlement after the war to have their voices heard. Rough estimates of the number of war casualties also demonstrate the difficulty in “counting the dead” and what the words “ war losses ” mean exactly when attempting to conduct a global assessment of the war. With regard to France, several recent studies have contributed to refining the data through tackling simultaneously the reality, distribution and management of those losses. For counting the losses is significant not just in terms of how high the number of casualties was relative to the number of individuals involved in the war, but also in terms of how the states involved handled the effects of the losses on their populations. The first issue addressed in this article is what the notion of war casualties can refer to, both for contemporary and historical assessments of war.