Monuments aux Morts

Monuments aux Morts are French war memorials established to commemorate the losses of World War I. After the end of the 1914–1918 war there was a frenzy to build memorials to commemorate those who had been killed and it has been calculated that in this period well over 36,000 individual memorials were erected throughout France with the majority of these being built between 1919 and 1926. These memorials are known as monuments aux morts - literally monuments to the dead and what are known in the United Kingdom as war memorials.

In the aftermath of what had proved to be such a bloody conflict, with France losing some 1,327,000 men, there was a need to come to terms with the loss of so many and in particular there was a need to create a focal point where people could remember their lost ones. This was particularly necessary when one remembers that few men's bodies were sent home but were buried on or near the battlefields, often a good distance from their home, and in many cases the harsh reality was that there was no body left or insufficient remains to identify the dead person involved; the word "missing" when applied to the dead of the Great War was to cast a shadow over so much of Europe. In France the monument aux morts was to be that focal point; a place that would possibly fill the void which the war had left for so many. In the final analysis the war memorial was to replace the individual grave and gravestone.

Monuments remembering those killed in war had first started to appear in France after the Franco-Prussian war but it was after the 1914–1918 conflict that the monuments started to appear in every town and village. What was new in the approach to the monument aux morts of the Great War was that they were to mark the death of the ordinary citizens and the grief and the loss suffered by their widows, their orphans and their parents, this as opposed to remembering and honouring armies, military leaders or great men of state. On the monuments the list of the dead follows for the most part alphabetically or chronologically. Little is made of rank because the monuments were meant to be egalitarian, as indeed was death. The epitaphs inscribed were often the same. « À nos morts », « Gloire à nos héros ».

With so many monuments involved and in Picardy there are well over 700 in the Somme region alone, it was inevitable that there would be a great variety in the types and forms of monuments erected, especially as they were to prove expensive and the war had left France, and indeed much of Europe, practically bankrupt and in the Picardy region many villages had been totally destroyed; rebuilding the villages was the priority.

In many cases the monument took the form of a simple obelisk, often surmounted by a gallic cock or a croix de guerre and perhaps embellished with a laurel, or some other symbol, and those communes who were able to afford more opted for a sculptural work, this sometimes an individual work by a sculptor but very often a work that was mass-produced and marketed by some of France's large foundries and marbreries. Indeed it was the existence of a commercial monument industry that made the creation of so many monument aux morts possible.

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