Figure 1.--Here is a decorated French priest who served in the French Army during World War I with an unidentified boy. It is likely he lost his father during the War. When we say that Frnce lost a generation, it also means that a whole generation of French children grew up without their fathers.

The French population only minimally changed after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). The German population was much larger and industrial production outpaced France as well. The difference in World War I was that France this time had powerful allies, largely thinks to Kaiser Wilhelm II disastrous foreign policy. The French-German struggle over Verdun was the most bloody struggle on the Western Front. The British think of the Somme in terms of casualties, but that was only one catastrophic battle. The Verdun campaign went on for months. Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, the German commander, designed the Verdun campaign to break the French Army. He was largely successful in doing just that. After Verdun the French Army was near mutiny and no longer capable of major offensive operations. But Verdun also weakened the German Army. France mobilized 8.4 million men to fight the War out of a population of 40 million. That was about 40 percent of the male population. Other than Russia, France paid the highest price among the Allies in terms of casualties. Nearly 1.4 million Frenchmen were killed in the War and 4.3 million wounded. Nearly a third were permanently handicapped. About 0.5 million were captured. [Shirer] Some 15 percent of the male population was lost or handicapped as a result of the War. Even worse about 60 percent of the male population between the ages of 18 and 28 years were lost or permanently handicapped. As so often phrased--France essentially lost an entire generation. This does not include the civilian casualties. They were a fraction of the military casualties, but were not negligible. And in recent years modern research has revised the numbers up. The Western front was largely fought in northern France with only a small portion south western Belgium. Some 40,000 civilians were killed in the War. [Pedroncini] and this is still probably a low estimate. They were killed as a result of the fighting, although the French Government evacuated civilians from the front-line areas. There were also German shelling of Paris and other cities. The Paris gun was one of the largest artillery pieces ever used and it was a pure terror weapon. Other casualties resulted from German forced labor and food shortages. The forced labor camp were not as bad as Word War II NAZI camps but they were bad enough. Notice the relatively small civilian casualty rate. Only about 3 percent, a small fraction of the military death toll. This was the general pattern in World War I -- in sharp contrast to World War II. World War II would be very different. This is because, a primary goal of the NAZI war effort was to kill civilians and in large numbers, especially Jews everywhere and civilians in the East--whole nationalities and ethnicities. This killing was not a mere footnote as historians too often treat it, but a primary NAZI war goal. Thus in World War II, far more civilians were killed than military personnel. This varied from country to country, depending largely on the NAZI racial assessment of the population and the need to keep economies like France operating so they could be looted. The Germans committed atrocities in World War I, but destroying whole populations was not a war goal.

Created: 3:48 PM 6/23/2022
Last updated: 3:49 PM 6/23/2022