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: 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. 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.