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: 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. Yet, although this figure does reveal the significant number of casualties, it does not reflect how difficult it is to assess them. War years
Losses recorded
1914
301.000
1915
349.000
1916
252.000
1917
164.000
1918
235.000
Table 1: French military war losses 1914-1918
As table 1 shows, the number of recorded casualties vary throughout the conflict. There were large differences in the number of combatants killed in action during the different war years. Losses reach a peak during great offensives and defensive battles.