Greater France and the Great War: A Century of Global Remembrance - Richard S. Fogerty

The global reverberations of the First World War were as clear in 1923 as they had been between 1914 and 1918: France and Belgium’s occupation of Germany’s industrial Ruhr region to enforce war reparations, along with the Treaty of Lausanne that officially ended the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente powers, were directly connected with the French colonial empire known as “Greater France.” France promised allies worried about racial hierarchies that it would not deploy troops from Africa and Asia in the Ruhr, as it had done earlier on the Western Front and in occupied Germany. Clearly, the Great War made matters of race and empire more relevant and fraught in the years after 1918, and long after 1923, as millions of people in France and its empire continued struggling to understand the meaning of the war and their service to France in a world still ruled by empires: deciphering the implications and remembrance of WWI was as much a global affair as waging it.

Presentation given as part of the National WWI Museum and Memorial's 2023 Symposium Milestones & Cornerstones

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