Veteran policy since the First World War in France
In France, the catastrophe of the First World War laid the foundations for veteran policy as we still know it today. It is based on the linked principles of reparation, recognition and solidarity, and is implemented in close partnership with the voluntary sector.
On 20 November 1917, Georges Clemenceau, appointed prime minister by President Poincaré a few days earlier, stood before parliament and declared: “These Frenchmen whom we had to send into battle have rights over us.” That speech formed the basis of the policy of recognition and reparation concerning veterans.
After the Great War, France put in place an original policy based on two principles that are still in force today: the right to compensation for any disabilities caused by war, and the right to recognition from the nation for those who have contributed to the armed defence of their country. For over a century, these principles have gone on guiding the State’s actions with regard to those who have fought to defend the French nation and people.
The “right to compensation”
The principle of reparation by the State of any harm suffered in its service, in particular during armed conflicts, is ancient and has seen many applications over the course of French history, as evidenced by the establishment of the Institution Nationale des Invalides in Paris, by Louis XIV, and its continued existence today. The French Revolution established the principle of a “debt of recognition from the Nation” by the law of 2 August 1790, but that debt was primarily moral and symbolic due to a lack of funds. It was not until the laws of 11 and 18 April 1831, under Louis-Philippe, that procedures were put in place – cumbersome, slow and complicated – for the military to award pensions to the seriously wounded and incurably disabled victims of “events of war” or accidents suffered when on deployment.
Prime minister Georges Clemenceau addressing the French parliament, 11 November 1918. © L’Illustration
With the First World War (1914-18), this method of organisation soon became obsolete: from the outset, the mass of wounded was considerable, and advances in war medicine meant that a great many of them survived, including some of the most seriously injured, among them an exceptional number of disabled and mutilated. The medical and administrative services in charge of processing the cases of discharge due to disability and the payment of pensions were immediately inundated. The injustice and anger felt by victims of the war prompted them to organise into associations and put pressure on the government. For the first time, the situation of the wounded was no longer a “peacetime matter” to be dealt with after the fighting, in the quiet of the medical committees and the offices of the Ministry of War, but a vital, burning issue for the State, which could not conduct a war while allowing a dramatic situation to develop at home, with a potentially disastrous impact on human lives and on the morale of the nation.
Thus, as early as 1915, associations of wounded and mutilated war pensioners put pressure on the government to take broader and fuller account of the situation of invalids sent home, and a reform was undertaken, leading in particular to the creation in 1916 of a public body: the Office des Mutilés. It still exists today as the National Office for Veterans and Victims of War (ONAC-VG), and is still run on the basis of equal representation of its members. Originally an agency of the Ministry of Labour, the Office des Mutilés coordinated the policies concerning medical care for veterans and their subsequent reintegration into society, in both wartime and peacetime.
The experience acquired in the matter, and the consultations carried out by veterans themselves, through their associations, led to the right to compensation being enshrined in law, with the Lugol Act of 31 March 1919, and the subsequent creation of a specific department, the Ministry of Pensions (which in 1938 became the Ministry of Veterans), supported by a considerable body of legislation and regulations which, in 1951, would be codified as the Code of Military Pensions for Invalidity and Victims of War (CPMIVG). This code, recast and added to many times, set out the terms of the “right to compensation”, which would gradually be extended to families, and gave a proper status to the uniquely French concept of the ancien combattant, or “veteran”.
A veteran’s card. © Collection Maurice Bleicher
The “right to recognition” and veteran status
In the immediate aftermath of the war, an extensive network of voluntary organisations developed, around veterans who had just been demobbed and were particularly fragile due to their social, professional and family circumstances. Formed primarily for the purposes of carrying on with the mutual aid that had begun in the trenches, advocating a “combatant spirit” built on social mixing and brotherhood in arms, these associations sought and obtained the Nation’s recognition for those who had truly played their part as “citizen-soldiers” by fighting: in 1926, the State set up a veteran’s office in charge of issuing the “veteran’s card” to former soldiers who had seen action during the war, thereby giving them a genuine status.
The veteran’s card offered access to a variety of measures of national recognition: constitution of a mutualist income matched by the State, allocation of an annual compensation payment (the veteran’s retirement pension, created in 1930), tax benefits. Veteran status would be progressively expanded to include former soldiers who served in North Africa between 1954 and 1964, then service personnel who took part in overseas operations. The award criteria have become less stringent in recent years.
Unique to France, all of these mechanisms for the recognition of active service by the Nation continue to be managed in close cooperation between veterans’ associations and the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which took over from the Ministry of Pensions and the Ministry of Veterans in 1999.