These thoughts extend to all those, of every nationality, who died in the war of 1914–18.
NOTES
1. Clemenceau led the French into World War I, and had been prime minister from 1906–09; Poincaré was prime minister in three governments and president during World War I; Maurras (Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras) was a French author and the leader of Action Française who (despite being a socialist) supported Clemenceau and France’s entry into World War I; Marshal Joseph Joffre (Papa Joffre) was a French général during World War I whose strategy led to the allied victory at the Battle of the Marne; Jean Jaurès was the leader of the French Socialist Party, and ardent antimilitarist who was assassinated at the outbreak of World War I; Aristide Briand served eleven terms as prime minister of France during the Third Republic, including a brief period before World War I.
2. Battle of Gravelotte (1870)—the largest battle during the Franco-Prussian War, named after Gravelotte, a village in Lorraine.
3. Robert Georges Nivelle, French artillery officer who served in the Boxer Rebellion, and the First World War; Joseph Simon Gallieni, military commander and administrator in the French colonies and finished his career during the First World War; Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff, German général, victor of Liège and of the Battle of Tannenberg.
4. Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Russian Field Marshal who served under Catherine II, Paul I and Alexander I.
5. Set up in 1919 by Ernest Vilgrain, under-secretary for agriculture and supplies, the “Vilgrain shacks” were rudimentary shops in makeshift shacks that offered Parisians food and other essentials at 20–30% of the price of other shops.
6. Alexandre Millerand would become president a year later, in 1920.
7. Léon Daudet (no relation to the writer), intellectual and politician of the third republic.
8. Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, a leading light in the French naturalist school and Georges Antoine Rochegrosse a French historical and decorative painter.
9. A French serial killer of the time—he was arrested and charged in 1919 and subsequently tried and executed in 1921.
10. A center-right coalition that formed the government from 1919 to 1924.
11. Action Libérale or Action Libérale Populaire was a (Catholic) French political party during the Third Republic, and joined the Bloc National after the 1919 election, and thereafter it disappeared.
12. Fédération républicaine, the largest conservative party during the Third Republic, and the senior party in of the Bloc National coalition.
13. Raoul Villan was the man who assassinated the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès on the eve of World War I. Although the facts were not in dispute, he was acquitted by popular jury in 1919, and Jaurès’s widow was forced to pay the costs of appealing the verdict.
14. Among the alumni of the École Polytechnique were four of the générals who led France to victory: Joffre, Foch, Fayolle and Maunoury. Almost a thousand polytechniciens died during World War I. The polytechniciens play a major role in celebrations after the war, though their role was controversial since not all in France felt the École Polytechnique had played a major role in the defense of their country.
15. Cirpure is the principal character in the Louis Guilloux’s 1935 novel Le Sang Noir (translated as Bitter Victory), based in Guilloux’s memories of his philosophy tutor, Georges Palante, an anarchist thinker who killed himself in 1925.
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