The war depleted several cohorts of young men and cut a lasting gash in the French population pyramid (Héran 2014, Bellis et al. The imprint of the conflict on France’s demography was profound. Over four years of battle, more than eight million French men served in the army, and historians have estimated that 1.3–1.5 million of them died in combat, representing between 16% and 18% of the male population of conscripts (e.g. ![]() WWI was a watershed moment for French society. This column reports on new findings revealed by the data. We recently published a new database that contributes to this effort for one of the conflict’s major protagonists, France. 2023), Italy (Fornasin 2017, Acemoglu et al. To this end, several research teams have recently assembled and released new data on WWI fatalities in Germany (De Juan et al. Historical data can and must bring new evidence to bear on the effects of war and on the dynamics of memory. After wars are fought, manipulated or simply incorrect statistics can affect not only compensation payments and war reparations, but memory and national narratives too. ![]() Maintaining morale necessitates manipulating statistics, inflating an opponent’s death count and deflating one’s own. As the war in Ukraine rages on, getting precise and accurate statistics on the number of those killed or injured in combat is a difficult statistical endeavour – one that even the world’s best intelligence services struggle with – as well as a politically sensitive exercise (Crawford 2022).
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