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Abstract
This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the database ‘Mémoire des hommes’, which is a record of more than 1 million French soldiers officially recognized as dead during the World War I (WWI). Integrating this source with the 1911 census, we evaluate the potential numbers of recruits by French regional department. From this, a model identifies the factors affecting the number of deaths. While demographic factors are the principal determinants, adding significant economic, political and spatial factors reduces the unexplained variance between regions and significantly improves the explanation of the disparity in the number of deaths by region.
Notes
2. Official definition: MPF is an official mark of respect that must appear in death registers in the margins of certificates concerning soldiers killed in combat or who died of their injuries. It was instituted by the law of 2 July 1915, to honor these deaths. It is the military authorities that decide on its attribution and determine when the death is noted in this way. In other cases (deaths in hospital, for example), it is up to the families to request attribution of this note. As A. Prost (Citation2008, 51) recalls, ‘Still today, the descendants of soldiers whom they feel have been forgotten (deaths in captivity or of pulmonary illness caused by gas) take this step, which explains why the MPF file, accessible on the internet, is not definitively complete’.
3. These figures are estimates that come from the management of the database.
4. The polemic over the figures essentially revolves around the number of deaths from the war (and not in the war, for which the MdH data source today seems to be irrefutable). We have chosen to deal with the question of regional disparities on the basis of MPF status, which identifies deaths in the war and allows us to avoid ‘polluting’ the figures for the deaths in the war with another question, that of deaths from the war, a question that is just as legitimate but that introduces biases in the counting of deaths in the war.
5. We use the term high (or low) mortality when the number of deaths is greater than (or, respectively, less than) a proportional figure based on demographic characteristics.
6. To a lesser extent, a similar pattern is observed for Franche-Comté.
7. An estimate of this ratio was made, but this did not yield fruitful results. One of the probable reasons is the weak variance of this ratio for the majority of regions.
8. The switch to the logarithm ensures the additive form of the estimated functional form.
9. It is in this manner that the SFIO vote is indicated on the political map of France from 1875 to 1914.
10. As Becker recalls in La France en guerre (Citation1988), Jaurès is the object of permanent outrage: Jaurès fought a duel against Déroulède, who had described him as ‘the most odious perverter of conscience that had ever, in France, played the game of the foreigner’ (12). Charles Mauras, ‘L’action française’, 18 July 1914: ‘Everyone knows Mr Jaurès is Germany’. Charles Péguy: ‘Right from the declaration of war, the first thing we will do will be to shoot Jaurès. We will not leave these traitors behind us to stab us in the back’ (comment reported by Romain Rolland in his Journal des années de guerre, Albin Michel, 31, 32).
11. Jaurès, La Dépêche, 30 April 1905.
12. , La grève des tranchées.
13. François Mauriac in Le nouveau Bloc-notes (Citation1960, 349) underlines the permanence of the ideological fracture after the Dreyfus affair: ‘Today we know that the Affair was not an accident, that the two spiritual families that drew up one against the other did not cease to confront one another’.
14. Calculated from the 1911 census, which presents the total population of the departments by age range. The potential recruits are those 20–27 years old; only ‘Class 19’ was mobilized in 1918 (taken into account in the calculations).
15. The number of mutineers observed in this region (see Table A4) seems to confirm this hypothesis.
16. Half of the sailor deaths come from the departments of Brittany; nonetheless, this factor (being involved in the navy) was ‘protective’, as the death rate in the navy was much lower than that in the infantry.
17. This variable does not capture an age effect. The categories of small employers and self-employed people do not necessarily include older people.
18. File 38 of the researcher’s guide, Association Bretagne 14–18.
19. Measured by a vote for the extreme Left greater than the average for French departments.
20. Estimate available from the authors upon request.
21. The equation produces significant coefficients at the 5% level as follows: Pr(anti-militarist departments)=-1.86 + 0.000004*( number of men aged 20–25 years). This indicates that for a department to be anti-militarist, it must have a significant number of young people between 19 and 25 years old.