Category: After the War

This is the second part of a two-parter on traces of la Grande Guerre in the cemeteries of Paris. In the first part, it was all about how those vestiges in Paris (but also, indeed, in any French community’s cemetery) have been shaped by people, by the Army and the State and by wealth, influence and status. Now, through real encounters in the cemeteries of Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse and Passy, what’s been shared so far helps explain the discoveries waiting for you.

Père-Lachaise

Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise is on the western edge of the eastern 20e arrondissement and we’ve got a useful guide waiting for us. With this blog, there seems little point in re-writing existing resources available online unless they need it because they contain errors of fact, obvious gaps or there’s no comparable resource available that can be drawn on. The usual criteria to go on is ‘English-language resource’ but, sometimes, the information is so readily available and intended as helpful that it’s wilful stupidity not to draw on it. Such is the case with le site des Amis et Passionnés du Père Lachaise (APPL) and its pages on la Grande Guerre 1914-1918, which is where many of the links in the next few paragraphs will lead you.

Père-Lachaise is reassuringly full of familiar names for the British and Americans. You can find all manner of celebrities you actually know (like Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison) are buried there and if anyone mentions other ‘famous names’, there’s a chance you’ve heard of them (Frédéric Chopin, Edith Piaf, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, Camille Pisarro, Georges Seurat, Marcel Proust, Olivia de Havilland and blah blah blah). Get the idea? It’s where you would want to be seen dead.

It’s the same for ‘celebs’ of la grande guerre. There’s Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Barbusse and the politician Joseph Caillaux, whose attempts to find a peaceful way out of the war for France found him cast as “l’homme de la défaite” and tried and found guilty of treason. All this after his second wife, Henriette, had escaped the guillotine after shooting dead the editor of Le Figaro newspaper in what the jury decided was a crime passionel.

Barbusse’s grave carries a tribute « À la mémoire de notre camarade, pour nos années de combat commun » from fellow members of l’Association républicaine des anciens combattants (A.R.A.C.) (of which he was co-founder and president) – one of a number of French old comrade associations – in this case closely linked to the French Communist Party. The complicated array of associations des anciens combattants and their connections to the politics of the 1920s and 1930s deserve a whole blog post of its own.

Outside of writers and politicians, two of those who might be thought as ‘greats’ of the war buried in the cemetery are Gustave-Auguste Ferrié and Hyacinthe Jean Vincent. In both cases, their work had an impact that went far beyond their war work. Vincent features prominently in this blog post. In the slide show below, you can see his grave and the plaque that honours his memory and achievements. Ferrié’s grave features perhaps the most understated acknowledgement of his incredibly important work – the tribute from the lycée named in his honour: « en Hommage au Général et Savant ». Gustave-Auguste Ferrié’s contribution to France’s war effort through his work on wireless technologies and radiotelegraphy is another thing that deserves a blog post of its own – something for the future. An important engineer whose général rank came from his hugely important technological work.

There are other Great War generals here: Pierre Guignabaudet and Paul François Grossetti both died during the war – one of wounds received from a shell burst, the other from dysentery. Guignabaudet’s grave features a fine relief portrait of him in Adrian helmet. On the other hand, Joseph Louis Andlauer, Étienne André Bapst, Charles Théodore Brécard, Gustave Paul Lacapelle and Raymond Sabattier all survived the war and were buried in family plots. But Père-Lachaise is, as previously indicated, the last resting place of the great and the good and its diverse population reflects the breadth of experiences of the war. There are officers from well-to-do families, non-commissioned officers and ‘ordinary’ soldiers to support this.

Among them is Sergent Henri Ernest Sevalle, a reservist who rejoined the colours of the 37e Régiment d’infanterie on 12 August 1914 and who was killed on 11 or 12 October 1914 in the fighting at Foncquevillers (Somme) – a place many will know for associations with the British fighting on the Somme in 1916. Sevalle’s matricule militaire details that his remains were “buried in the garden behind the Gendarmerie 20 metres from the house at Foncquevillers”. His body’s here because, either during or after the war, his was one of the bereaved families that pressed the authorities to allow them to recover the remains of their loved one and bury them in the family vault. 

The bodies of brothers Marcel and Maurice Dupont (Maréchal des Logis, 7e Dragons and Sergent, 154e Régiment d’infanterie respectively) lie beneath a headstone showing the two in Adrian helmets in profile. Marcel died in April 1917 from wounds received in an accident while taking part in a training course for bombers in the use of grenades. His younger brother had died almost two years previously (18 July 1915) in fighting at Bois de la Gruerie (known as « le Bois de la Tuerie » in 1915 a deadly location). Beside both names are croix de guerre – each with an étoile of worn and indeterminate colour. Maurice’s service record mentions the posthumous award of the médaille militaire, but no CdeG. In Marcel’s case, however, it’s clear his star is silver having received a citation à l’ordre de la division in July 1916 for taking charge of a group of men dispersed by an enemy bombardment and leading them to a support position, though under intense fire.

Civilian Casualties of War

All the cemeteries featured in this post are primarily non-military in nature. So far, regarding Père-Lachaise, the focus has been on those who served in the military who are buried and remembered there. However, Père-Lachaise also has reminders that the war produced many civilian casualties. On Good Friday (« le Vendredi Saint »), 1918 (29 March), the church of Saint-Gervais Saint-Protais in the rue des Barres in the 4^ème Arrondissement (the Marais) was struck by a German long-range artillery shell whilst a Mass was in progress. There were 91 dead and 68 injured among the congregation. Many were women. Among those victims of this incident buried at Père-Lachaise are Héloïse Strehler, Marie Thérèse Brisset de Morcour, Claudine Martin, Julie Marie Sophie Mouchet and her husband, Léonce. In this case, most are family tombs.

Also, in Division 89 of the cemetery are the graves provided by the City of Paris for the victims of two further catastrophes of war involving civilian casualties – the explosion of the grenade factory on rue de Tolbiac (October 20, 1915) in which 46 dead and 97 injured (again there were many women among the casualties), and victims of the attack by a German Zeppelin on the quartier de Ménilmontant on the night of January 29, 1916, resulting in an estimated 64 victims: 26 dead and 32 to 38 injured.

Montparnasse Cemetery – something tangible?

At this point, let’s switch attention to Montparnasse in the south of the city. Montparnasse, too, has its share of ‘names’: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Chirac, the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles Baudelaire, Susan Sontag, Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg, Guy de Maupassant … (I’m trying to score hits across the board here). Here, there’s another guide we can draw upon waiting to help us in the form of « Héros de la Grande Guerre au cimetière du Montparnasse » available as a PDF from the website of the author, Philippe Landru. Landru has also produced a similar guide for Père-Lachaise. Having one of these guides with you is useful, but don’t just follow them. You’ll deny yourself the opportunity of making your own discoveries.

For example, one of the most significant individuals buried at Montparnasse, and a veteran of the Great War, Alfred Dreyfus isn’t mentioned in this guide. The man at the centre of the political scandal that divided the French Third Republic between 1894 and 1906: « L’Affaire Dreyfus ». A man arrested for crimes he didn’t commit and degraded as an army officer in front of his former comrades. A man who many in the army insisted was guilty and who denied the possibility of his innocence – in many cases because he was a Jew. A man who spent over four years imprisoned on l’île du Diable in French Guiana and, ultimately, survived to have his innocence proved and to recover his honour and position and continue his career. The same Alfred Dreyfus who, in the First World War, was a reservist artillery officer and saw action on the Chemin des Dames in Spring 1917.

While my photographs fail to do justice to the monument to Adolphe Pégoud, the first French ‘ace’ of the war who’d brought down six aircraft before he was shot down himself on the last day of August 1915 by one of his former pupils, Unteroffizier Walter Kandulski, I’ve included the ones I did take because they give me a reason to post a picture of his (seemingly not-lucky-enough) mascot¹ now on display in the musée de l’Armée. His monument also tells us he completed « le premier looping de l’histoire de l’aviation ».

A cemetery visitor might not be drawn to the memorial plaque and, therefore, the story of Geneviève Hennet de Goutel without Landru’s guide. Describing her as « Une infirmière de talent… », we learn details that are on her grave marker, but more too. Infirmière-major (Staff Nurse) at la Société de Secours
aux Blessés Militaires (the Relief Society for Wounded Soldiers), hers is a story of France’s involvement in the war in the Balkans against the Central Powers. She was awarded the French croix de guerre and the Romanian Crucea Regina Maria (Queen Mary’s Cross, which rewarded those who contributed to the care of the wounded and the sick and those who distinguished themselves through their sanitary activity and service in time of war or epidemic), as well as the médaille d’honneur des épidémies – a French distinction for service in the fight against disease and epidemics. She herself fell victim to typhus in March 1917 while at Jassy in Romania, where she had established a hospital. There’s a good deal more in the guide.

The grave of (Fernand) Louis Verlhac, aspirant of 162e RI, MPLF in March 1918 represents one of the sadder aspects of an already-sad situation. As you can see from the photographs I’ve posted, his grave has his portrait photograph and representations of his médaille militaire and croix de guerre (notice the latter has a star and palm – a citation at corps level (« une étoile vermeille » according to his matricule militaire) and an army citation (the palm). But there’s clearly no one now taking care of this grave. Verlhac’s body was exhumed from a grave in what may be “Minorville”^{^} (I’d originally thought Lironville) – presumably at the request of his family. A dreadful irony then that in a nécropole nationale near the old front line his grave would be maintained by the state. Now, it seems there’s no one who cares enough to tend it.

Equally sad is the shattered stone recording the death of Jean Rambach « sous Verdun »* on 8 May 1916. The upper half of the stone is (perhaps irreparably) damaged but an enamel plaque bearing Jean’s name and dates of birth and death survives. And from this we learn that maréchal des logis Jean (Isaac Edmond) Rambach of 12e Régiment d’artillerie died a day short of his 20th birthday.

However, even more obvious connections to the war are what inevitably draw the eye, and there are two things Montparnasse has particular examples of: stained glass and wooden crosses.

The stained or coloured glass of the tomb ‘Lazare – Lion – Famille Alfred Cahen’ illuminates the incredibly detailed and lifelike marble bust of le sous-lieutenant Armand Cahen (as shown in the header image for this article), which shows his regiment’s number on his collar tabs, the étoile on the ribbon of his croix de guerre and the fourragère on his left shoulder. The latter was awarded to Armand’s unit, 59^e Régiment d’artillerie de campagne, in December 1918. Armand Cahen died at Maule (78), south-west of Paris in 1920. He’s likely, then, shown in his uniform from that date. His likeness is an example of an aspect of the cemeteries that I also saw. The tribute to the héro sometimes dominates the family history of the tomb or vault. I think this says something of the significance attached to loss in the cataclysmic conflict that was the First World War.

It’s also evident with the Olchanski vault. Here a stained-glass window imagines the moment on 6 June 1918 when le capitaine Jacques Olchanski of the 99e RI was killed leading his unit in the attack (cleverly, the German defenders of the trench being attacked are almost devoid of colour, except grey). One corner of the image is a portrait of Olchanski. Inside the entrance is a sort of framed slate engraved with details of Olchanski’s service and one of his citations (he gained 5). I’ve never seen anything similar and wonder if anyone else has. A marble plaque (not posted) also provides more detail.

Another of these vitraux patriotiques features as part of the individual tomb dedicated to le sous-lieutenant (Jacob) Marcel Suss – a former pupil of the elite school for engineers and scientists, the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures de Paris. Suss (‘Süss’ in his matricule militaire) was an officer with 14e régiment d’artillerie during the First Battle of the Marne when he was killed on 9 September 1914.

There are generals buried in Montparnasse just as there are at Père-Lachaise. Augustin Dubail was a former Chief of Staff of the Army and, under Joffre, commander of le Groupe d’armées de l’Est, sacked as a consequence of the German attack on Verdun in February 1916, although he’d expressed repeated concerns over the state of the defences there. He was later Military Governor of le camp retranché de Paris. His status at Montparnasse as a general who held high office and who served during both the War of 1870 and the First World War is undermined by a général whose early death in the war and its circumstances and commemoration have a far greater visual impact. And it’s a cross that achieves this.

That general was (Marie Joseph) Eugène Bridoux, commander of the 5^e division de cavalerie on the outbreak of war who, on 17 September 1914, was shot and killed by men of a German cyclist unit while reconnoitring by car in an area of fighting. His grave at Montparnasse remarkably still bears the remains of the cross that marked his original place of burial. It’s exposed to the elements and in a ragged condition – a remarkable survivor. For now.

However, Montparnasse can surpass even itself with another wooden cross – the original grave marker – in the family vault entrance (and, so, more protected from the elements) of le lieutenant Léon André Louis Bernard of the 7ème compagnie of the 102e Régiment d’infanterie, where one can still read, traced in black ink on the wood, his name and the number of the ambulance (6/4) where he died of his injuries at Verdun on 17 September 1916.

Finally, if you think these wooden crosses are a ‘Great War thing’, take time at Montparnasse to find the memorial to Aspirant Jean-Pierre Crémieux-Bach and Pierre Pupin.

The cemetery at Passy – Under the eye of la Tour Eiffel

But now time to move on to le Cimetière de Passy which is on a raised level behind the rather-ignored Monument à la Gloire des armées françaises designed by Paul Landowski (who’s buried in the cemetery) is in a district described as ‘chic’. It’s definitely a cemetery with cachet – although why anyone needs that when they are dead is something I don’t understand. The names are sometimes more obscure but include Bảo Đại, the last Emperor of Vietnam, Alexandre Millerand – ministre de la Guerre on the outbreak of the First World War and later Président du Conseil des ministres and, ultimately, Président de la République française, the painter Édouard Manet, the composers Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, Marcel Renault (of the motor company), There are actresses (actors if you prefer) and anarchists, and socialites and socialists, industrialists and novelists. Regarding other Great War connections, this was where Maurice Genevoix was buried until he was panthéonisé in 2020. I missed the grave of Maurice Gamelin – probably better known for his role in the Second World War but a member of Joffre’s staff and, subsequently, a divisional commander in the Great War. Philippe Bunau-Varilla is also buried here, as is Henry Farman, the aviation pioneer. Le général Charles Huntziger, known as a Vichy general and the man who signed the 22 June 1940 Armistice with Nazi Germany in the name of France in the same railway carriage where the Armistice of 11 Novmber 1918 had been signed, is also buried here. In the 1914-1918 war he was chef du bureau d’opérations at the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force on the Front d’Orient (the Salonika Front). 

At Passy, the monument to the Wessbecher brothers, André and Henry is simple but demands a closer look. A cross with the date ‘1918’ and short inscription « Pour Toi France ». But, beneath it are the two deceased men’s ‘biographies’. In the case of André, there’s much more here than in his matricule militaire: the award of médaille militaire and croix de guerre, his service in the air service and even the manner of his death in June 1918 while flying low attacking enemy troops on the ground. In Henry’s case, death came in September 1918, although he’d previously been wounded and gassed. The monument records he was a chevalier de la légion d’honneur and had been awarded the croix de guerre. It seems from the cemetery records (digitised and available via the Geneanet website), that both brothers were originally buried elsewhere, before being re-buried in January 1921 at Passy.

Sometimes, the traces of les morts de la grande guerre are quite ephemeral. Digging deeper can reveal hidden histories. The family tomb inscription for bank employee and maréchal des logis Paul (Louis Fernand) Marcoux, tells us he was mort pour la France at Flaucourt on the Somme on 7 July 1916, but makes no mention of his brigade citation or the posthumous award of the médaille militaire in December 1920.

I photographed the headstone of (Georges) Robert Nivelle – the man who was généralissime and commandant en chef des armées françaises on the Western Front from December 1916 to May 1917 and the man most notably remembered for the military operation on the Chemin des Dames that began in April 1917 that’s usually given his name and that failed so badly to achieve its aims. Nivelle died in 1924. I should have realised, however, that Nivelle’s body was exhumed and re-interred at Les Invalides in 1931.

Throughout these cemetery visits, I was often struck by stories that went across the years, wars and even centuries. At Passy, there’s an example in the stories of two Lieutenants, both called Jacques Petit Le Roy. One being the uncle of the other. The first, (Albert Marie) Jacques, was an officer in 155e RI, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and croix de guerre when, on 29 January 1915, he was killed by a bullet whilst in the front line « environ 500 m à droite de la route de Binarville à Vienne-le-Château » – another victim of « le Bois de la Tuerie ». His body was never recovered. His nephew, Jacques (Albert André Serge), was a 28-year-old member of the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur (FFI) – the combined military forces of various elements of the Second World War ‘French Resistance’ – who had fought in 1939-40. In August 1944, he was killed by a German patrol as he returned from delivering a message from le général Jacques Chaban-Delmas, responsible for military co-ordination between the FFI and Inter-Allied high command, to le général Philippe Leclerc, whose armoured columns were pushing into the suburbs of Paris while an armed uprising was struggling against the Germans occupying the city. There’s a road, Rue du Lieutenant Petit le Roy, named in his honour at Chevilly-Larue, where he was killed. It joins Rue de l’Adjudant-Chef Dericbourg, named after the member of Leclerc’s staff who was killed alongside Petit le Roy.

The last encounter with the dead of Passy Cemetery I want to mention is with Aspirant Jean (Ernest Claude) Bluzet of 232e RI, who was already the holder of the médaille militaire and the croix de guerre when he died of wounds at Ambulance 9/10, Villers-Marmery (51) at the age of 19 on 27 May 1917, and, more specifically, with his father, le colonel René(-Marie-Philippe) Bluzet, Commandant, la 117^e Brigade, Officier de la Légion d’Honneur, croix de guerre, who pre-deceased Jean, dying of his wounds at Ambulance 1/59, Morville-sur-Seille (54) on 11 October 1915 at the age of 44.

I’d intended including the Bluzets as an example of father and son service and sacrifice, but also because of the attractive memorial with its Latin “Manibus Date Lauros Plenis” (“Give me armfuls of laurels”, perhaps). However, while putting together this post, I started reading Henry Morel-Journel’s Journal d’un officier de la 74e Division d’infanterie et de l’armée française d’Italie (1914-1918) and, by an amazing coincidence, after adding the Bluzets to the list of stories to cover, the next time I read Morel-Journel’s Journal, it was this I read:

Gelant dans la tranchée, nous nous retirons dans un abri souterrain en forme de tramway. Assis face à face sur des banquettes de terre, nous composons un groupe pittoresque ; dans le fond, deux de mes camarades qui ont passé une nuit blanche, sommeillent ; en face d’eux, le colonel de notre artillerie et un de ses chefs d’escadron, enveloppés dans leurs grands manteaux, semblent des figures hiératiques. Le général, lui, la bouche souriante, la cigarette à la main, est assis dans ce trou avec des attitudes de confortable élégance, comme dans un fauteuil de fumoir. Il écoute le lieutenant-colonel Bluzet, commandant notre 223e régiment — fin, blond, la figure d’un capitaine — nous raconter ses campagnes.

Morel-Journel, Henry. Journal d’un officier de la 74e Division d’infanterie et de l’armée française d’Italie (1914-1918) (French Edition) (p. 111). FeniXX réédition numérique. Kindle Edition.

« fin, blond, la figure d’un capitaine. » This was November 1914. Eagerly, I read on:

Le colonel Bluzet, au sortir de Saint-Cyr, a passé douze ans dans l’infanterie coloniale ; il faisait partie de la colonne Joffre qui a pris Tombouctou. Il nous parle des Touaregs, de leurs femmes aux traits purs qui ont le visage découvert tandis que les hommes sont voilés, parce qu’une fois les femmes d’une tribu repoussèrent un ennemi devant lequel les hommes avaient fui.

Morel-Journel, Henry. Journal (p. 112). FeniXX réédition numérique. Kindle Edition.

Reading back, I found this was the « fou » Bluzet (according to his divisional commander, général Louis Bigot), whose telegram had sent news of the German withdrawal from Lunéville on 12 September 1914 – a sure indicator of French victory in la Bataille du Grand-Couronné:

« Suis à Chauffontaine, dans une heure serai avec mon régiment dans Lunéville ».

Morel-Journel, Journal (p. 79).

And here he was, distracting those with him sheltering in an inadequate abri from a German bombardment with stories of his pre-war Saharan experiences. Memorialised in print and, after death, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

I hope these two blog posts (together with my recent post on « Nécropoles nationales», « Cimetières » and « carrés militaires ») will encourage anyone who reads them to explore the cemeteries of Paris and those of any French city or commune with a better understanding of what stories there are to discover there, and that I’ve done something to pay tribute to those who served and died for France in la Grande Guerre.

* Here I think with the meaning ‘in the shadow of’ rather than more literally ‘under’. Rambach died at Montzéville (55) in the Argonne and was originally buried at Dombasle-en-Argonne.

^{^} Thanks to @nbuchon.me on BlueSky for their help in trying to interpret the handwriting!

1. The subject, without foundation, of recent internet speculation. ↩︎