The French military cemetery in Vientiane (Laos)
Over 230 000 soldiers are buried at approximately 1 000 burial sites across more than 80 countries and six overseas territories. The Ministry of the Armed Forces Directorate for Remembrance, Culture and Archives (DMCA) ensures the upkeep, in perpetuity, of the graves of French service personnel killed overseas, together with memorial stones, in 59 of these countries and non-metropolitan French territories.
The graves are linked to contemporary conflicts: the Franco-Prussian War, the First and Second World Wars, the First Indochina War, the wars in North Africa and, more recently, servicemen and women killed in overseas operations. But they also include 19th-century conflicts like the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War, in which France took part. The Ministry of the Armed Forces also preserves the graves of service personnel killed other than in war service, known as tombes de garnison, or “garrison graves”. These graves are located, for the most part, in overseas departments and collectivities, as well as former French colonies. In other countries, French military burial sites are maintained by governments, local authorities or local organisations. The Ministry of the Armed Forces monitors their upkeep through the French diplomatic posts.
The DMCA is therefore responsible for the only French military cemetery in Laos, at Vientiane. It is also one of the few remembrance sites in the three countries (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) that comprised the former French colony of Indochina, the soldiers killed in Vietnam having been repatriated to the cemetery of Fréjus, in the Var, in the 1980s.
This remembrance site contains the bodies of French soldiers who fought in the First Indochina War, of which Laos was a major theatre.
In the early 1980s, the Laos authorities, in collaboration with the French authorities, decided to relocate the bodies of the French soldiers buried in this cemetery, allocating a piece of land for their burial. The Ministry of the Armed Forces provides the French Embassy with funding to ensure its upkeep, through the Defence Attaché’s Office.
The cemetery covers an area of 6 555 m² and contains 576 individual graves (479 identified and 97 unidentified graves), together with five graves holding 43 bodies, including 22 unknown soldiers. It also contains 50 civilian graves.
The graves are laid out in four plots before a war memorial. Each grave has a plaque bearing the soldier’s name, rank, unit and date of death. On the front of the tombstone is a religious symbol referring to the deceased’s confession.
The cemetery is low-lying compared to the adjoining land and the two roads running alongside it and, as a result, for some years it had been suffering regular flooding, despite water drainage works. In 2021, taking advantage of road-widening works being carried out by the Laotian authorities on the road adjacent to the cemetery, flood prevention works were undertaken with funding secured by the DMCA. Those works involved demolishing then rebuilding the front outer wall, raising the current level of the ground in relation to the new road to prevent flooding in the rainy season, and relocating all of the graves. The redeveloped site will ensure the long-term preservation of the graves, in conditions worthy of the men and women killed in the line of duty.
The DMCA, in partnership with the Defence Attaché’s Office at the French Embassy to Laos, also supports important historical research on the French military cemetery of Vientiane, to find out the life stories of the soldiers buried there.
© DR
© DR
© DR
© DR
© DR