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: For the High Command, the casualties represent the men out of action, either dead, wounded, missing or taken as prisoners of war. Here, war casualties are defined as the civilians and the military personnel who died as a result of military operations. Thus, even though the First World War was on this count a war carried on by regular armies, facing each other, it was also a theatre of violence inflicted upon civilian populations as a result of invasions, forced migrations, and strategic bombings afflicting some territories outside of the combat zones. All of this despite the successive treaties of The Hague and Geneva, which had tried prior to the war to better protect the separation between the military war and civilian life. The perception of the number of deaths affects memories of the conflict retained by the members of the communities affected by the war to varying degrees. Local archives, for instance, show how mourning communities, such as city councils, contributed to counting their war casualties and how they intended to honour them. It is interesting to consider how these differences in assessing the number of dead affect the ways that communities remember the conflict today, one hundred years after it began. Assessing military and civilian casualties: Policy regarding how to handle military casualties ↑
The delicate management of the number of troops ↑
The 1914-1918 war showed the involvement of 8 million French soldiers belonging to several age groups for over four years, 7 million of which were working in the combat zones. On average, nearly 900 men were killed every day.