Sarkozy remembers France's forgotten WWI "heroes"

Say what you like about the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and since he took office in May last year plenty has been written and said.

But during yesterday's speech to mark the 90th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended World War One, he paid tribute to the forgotten few who were killed during the four years of fighting - French soldiers who had faced the firing squads after being courts martialled.

It was a first for a French president - acknowledging the stand some men had taken in refusing to fight and the price they had paid for that decision.

The remembrance service took place in Douaumont in the east of France, at the ossuary erected in the 1920s to commemorate the more than 250,000 men who died during the battle of Verdun in 1916.

The emphasis and tone of the ceremony was not on glorifying war, or on the victory of one side over another, but to pay tribute to those who died and mark the official end of WWI with the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918.

While Sarkozy paid tribute to those who had fought and laid down their lives from 1914-1918, he also made it clear that many of those who had refused to fight were far from being "traitors".

"I think of these men who were too exposed and of whom too much was asked," he said.

"Sometimes they were sent to certain death by ill-advised commanding officers, and I think also of those men who lost the will and the strength to fight," he continued.

"But 90 years after the end of the war, I solemnly declare on behalf of the nation that many who were executed did not bring dishonour on themselves. They were not cowards but had just reached the utter limits of their strength."

Remember French men at the time had no choice in the matter as to whether they served.

There was military conscription and France was a country in which the right not to serve on the grounds of being a conscientious objector wasn't recognised (until 1963).

Sarkozy's closing message also focused on those who had faced the firing squads.

"Let us remember that they could have been our sons, he said.

"Let us remember that they were also victims of a tragedy which took away the lives of so many men who had not been prepared to such for such a fight."

And that was a theme developed further in a report on TF1's prime time news on Tuesday, which told the tale of a whole company in northern France, which in 1915 refused to fight after 600 of their number had been killed in three previous attacks on German positions.

All 250 men were courts martialled, four of them were found guilty and executed (they were formally rehabilitated in 1934) and the rest sent back to fight on the front.

In total over the course of the four years from 1914-1918 around 2,400 French soldiers were tried for mutiny, desertion, or fraternising with the enemy, with around 600 of them being executed.

The rest were either forced into hard labour or sent back to the front to meet near certain death.

"Those soldiers were also the victims of war," historian Nicolas Offenstadt said.

"In other words they were serving in the trenches under extreme conditions and subject to continuous bombardments, many of them snapped - psychologically," he added.

"Some of them didn't want to serve and simply attempted to escape from the front."

Fewer than 10 of the men who faced the firing squads during the war have since been formally rehabilitated.

While Sarkozy's speech during Tuesday's ceremony was not in itself an official endorsement of that process, it could perhaps be seen to some as a step in that direction.