![]() On January 28, 1921, the French Unknown Soldier was officially buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. (This ceremony was portrayed in Bertrand Tavernier’s movie Life and Nothing But.) He laid a bouquet of red and white carnations on the sixth casket. On November 10, 1920, in Verdun, accompanied by the minister André Maginot, the young soldier stood before eight coffins, each from a different combat zone: Artois, Champagne, Chemin des Dames, Flanders, Ile-de-France, Lorraine, the Somme, and Verdun. ![]() The choice of who to bury was given to a 19-year-old veteran, Auguste Thin. It was therefore decided that the Unknown Soldier would be laid to rest below the Arc de Triomphe, which was built to honor the armies of the Revolution and the First Empire. The Panthéon in Paris is associated with “great men” and the former church was not sufficiently secular. Three years later, the French National Assembly voted in favor of the proposition to bury a soldier “lost in death.” In 1916, the idea of an unknown soldier to represent them was put forward. ![]() The challenge was therefore to find a way to pay tribute to the nameless dead. Their bodies were never found or could not be identified. During the Great War, 300,000 French soldiers were reported missing in action. ![]()
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