Traces of La Grande Guerre in the Cemeteries of Paris: (1) Introduction

Or, how to give up romantic notions of Paris and move the focus to Death and Loss …

In September 2024, I had the opportunity for a stay of almost a week in Paris and, without the need to consider the interests and tastes of anyone else, a chance to take in a range of historical sites relating to the First World War, as well as the siege of Paris during the War of 1870 and the Paris Commune. In this and a follow-on post, I want to focus on my time during that visit spent in the cities of the dead: the traces of la Grande Guerre in some of the cemeteries of Paris.

I’ve posted on BlueSky about one aspect of this before. The incredible memorial now to be found on the walls of probably the best known of the Paris municipal cemeteries, Père Lachaise:

This is the Paris memorial to those from the city who died during the Great War. It was erected on the wall of Père Lachaise cemetery in 2018. A view from a bus travelling one stop can’t fail to make you ponder the loss in that conflict #1GM #fwwhist #WW1

— Debout les Morts ! (@vingtfrong.bsky.social) 2024-09-23T19:11:35.270Z

What you’re seeing on the short video are panels like these.

These are the names of 94,415 dead and 8,000 missing Parisians from the Great War. The entire length of the memorial is 280 metres, and each panel is 1.30 metres high. It’s quite remarkable.

This is a recent commemorative response from the centenary period. Yet within the cemeteries of Paris, there’s evidence of France’s distinct approach to the scale of loss in the war and to the grief of families of the nation’s citizens in the immediate aftermath of the war. In the follow on to this post, we’ll look at what stories you can find in some of the Parisian cemeteries and the useful information that’s there to help and inspire you. First of all, however, a post to help with understanding why you may see what you see. How the French state and people’s responses to the enormity of the cost in terms of lives lost in the war bring us to where things are today.

A Rising and Inexorable Tide of Grief

From the outbreak of the war, bereaved families pressed the civil and military authorities to allow them to recover the remains of their loved ones and bury them closer to home. Responses to these requests fluctuated between authorization and refusal. In order to clear up the confusion, on 19 November 1914, Joffre formally prohibited any transfer of bodies from within the zone des armées (In a future blog post, I plan to share more detail on the significance of this division of the war front into zones). Only the bodies of deceased soldiers buried in the zone de l’intérieur could be returned, and there was a fee to be paid for doing so (as was the case in certain civilian circumstances).

Meanwhile, the French authorities wanted to bring soldiers’ graves in the zone des armées (which moved as the war front moved eastwards or westwards) together in official cemeteries. In some ways, the reasons for this are still there to this day: ease, and reduced cost, of maintenance; a desire to return land to agricultural or other use as soon as possible; and reduced ‘friction’ with local populations – the graves of whose loved ones, if known, might be altogether elsewhere. This was to be an exercise in doomed ambition. Isolated individual graves were elusive and often inaccessible – there being no zone of ‘current’ conflict separate from sites of previous fighting. In some cases, this is why they survive to this day. In others, the site of the grave was the scene of the action in which the deceased had fought – their surviving comrades or family wishing to commemorate their courage and sacrifice on the spot. During and after the war, the state tried to deny access to the devastated areas to families seeking to retrieve the bodies of their kin from battlefield graves. An unseemly struggle between the Republic and grieving relatives developed.

This article (in French) opens with an account of one grieving mother’s response:

“It is my duty to bring to your attention the following case. There is a military cemetery in the commune of St-Gilles. On May 29, Ascension Day, Madame Descoutis, director of the school in Montluçon (Allier) had the body of her son exhumed in the said cemetery and after placing it in a leaded coffin transported it to Montluçon by car. All this was done naturally without any authorization, as the law does not allow for the exhumation or transfer of military bodies.” ¹

Under sustained pressure, and on the advice of a commission established under the presidency of général Édouard de Castelnau (who himself had lost three sons – Gérald (1879-1914), Xavier (1893-1914) and Hugues (1895-1915) – to the war), the government backed down and the law of 31 July 1920 finally allowed for the transfer of bodies from the war-zone.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, this marked a significant difference from the British Empire and Dominion experience where the Imperial War Graves Commission lobbied largely successfully for the bodies of those who had died abroad not to be repatriated, and for bodies scattered in isolated graves and makeshift burial grounds to be exhumed and ‘concentrated’ into larger cemeteries.

In the case of France, to keep control of the operations and treat all families equally, the government organized and funded the transfer of soldiers’ bodies. A department responsible for returning bodies (the Service de restitution des corps) was created within what became the Ministry of Pensions, headed by the war veteran and very important (for more than one reason) André Maginot as Ministre des Pensions, Primes et Allocations de guerre. From 1922 onwards, 240,000 coffins were returned to family graves, which represented one-third of identified bodies: considerably more than in the case of other nations.

A pause here to add what I hope is thought-provoking additional information. The artillery of the war could and did blow men out of existence, such that no physical elements remained to be interred anywhere. Beyond these cases, nearly half of the dead were given no grave other than the ossuaires. The largest of these is at Douaumont and contains the remains of 130,000 French and German soldiers. This huge figure might lead to thoughts of exceptionalism if the nature of the fighting here (concentrated over a long period in a relatively small area and with the very real intention on the part of the Germans to inflict unsustainable losses on the French through attrition) is considered. However, in the largest cemetery on the Western Front at Notre-Dame de Lorette there are 20,058 bodies in graves and an estimated 20,000 in the ossuary. Almost equal numbers of unidentifiable fragments of men as bodies capable of being buried in a grave – a situation that can be found closely echoed in plenty of other places, large or small (examples chosen at random): Cerny-en-Laonnois : 5.150 bodies, of which 2.386 are en ossuaire; Dannemarie : 250 in individual graves and 139 ‘distributed’ in two ossuaires; Col de la Chipotte : 1,899 bodies, 1,006 buried in graves, 893 in an ossuary; Auberive : nearly 7,000 bodies, of which nearly 2,900 are buried in three ossuaries.² Then, as noted in my post on war cemeteries, there are the individual ‘smaller’ (it’s all relative) ossuaires in many nécropoles with perhaps the remains of a hundred and sometimes as many as 3-4,000 bodies.

My posts on military graves and cemeteries and this one are intended to draw attention to how ‘hidden’ from understanding the true cost of the war to France in terms of lives really is. We don’t, by any means, have a true picture of the losses from the grave markers in a French nécropole. They only tell a part of the story. Although this is true of the British and German cemeteries as well, it’s especially so in the case of the French and Germans.

In summary, then, what anyone looking for traces of the First World War in the cemeteries of Paris (or indeed any French city, town or commune that was not under German control during the war) will encounter has been shaped by decisions made by the army and the state, and by communities and the bereaved families of dead soldiers – as well as by the level of wealth and influence and status of the individual or their family and networks. The influence of the zone des armées / zone de l’intérieur split can be seen and is often indirectly referenced as we’ll see and for which we’ll look at possible reasons. We’ll see the beauty and poignancy of tributes from families and others, and we’ll see endless opportunities to look deeper into aspects of the French military experience with connections to combat on land, sea and in the air. It’s a worthwhile experience for anyone interested in la Grande Guerre and a starting point to many other aspects of the huge subject of France and its people at war.

Note: This post has been influenced and shaped by the work of Professeure Béatrix Pau. a historian specialising in the First World War and particularly in death, the management of corpses and the ‘demobilisation of the dead’³.

1. Archives Départementales de la Marne, 2 R 212, letter from the mayor of Saint-Gilles to the préfet de la Marne, 14 June 1919 quoted in Béatrix Pau, « La violation des sépultures militaires, 1919-1920 », Revue Historique des armées [En ligne], 259 | 2010, mis en ligne le 06 mai 2010, consulté le 15 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rha/6980. ↩︎
2. There are exceptions such as Le Mont Frenet à La Cheppe – created in 1915 to bury those soldiers who died of wounds at ambulance 3/65, which operated from this site. A site, as a consequence, with no ossuary and most graves ‘known’. ↩︎
3. In addition to the work cited above, see Béatrix Pau-Heyriès. « Le marché des cercueils après-guerre, 1918-1924 », Revue Historique des Armées  [En ligne], 224 | 2001. consulté 16 mars 2025. pp. 65-80., URL : www.persee.fr/doc/rharm_0035-3299_2001_num_224_3_5035 and Béatrix Pau, “Des familles divisées dans le deuil : laisser les corps dans les cimetières militaires ou demander leur restitution”. In Un siècle de sites funéraires de la Grande Guerre, edited by Annette Becker and Stéphane Tison. Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2018. URL : https://books.openedition.org/pupo/22662 ↩︎