VISAGES DE VERDUN

To mark the centenary of the Battle of Verdun (February-December 1916), Michel Bernard recount
this unique moment in the history of the First World War in words and images, showing us the faces of the soldiers

Michel Bernard gets as close as possible to the reality of the men fighting at Verdun by focusing on their faces. Obviously they express pain, suffering, exhaustion and madness, but these faces also testify to solidarity, the moments of joy, and the emotional and physical diversity of the men of Verdun. They tell of the war, their lived experience.
This book is constructed around a text that is more literary than historical, which Bernard's pen has made uniquely poetic, and a hundred unpublished images from the Archives of the Photograph Section of the French Army. While everything is true in the text, it is not the dry account of events or strategic and tactical questions that interest the author. It is the emotions of soldiers reflected in their expressions frozen on film. This original perspective – text and image – gives us a better understanding of the humanity and individuality of the participants in this legendary battle of the Great War.

MICHEL BERNARD, historian and government official , is an exceptionally gifted writer and one of the top experts on the Great War as seen by its writer-combatants, notably Maurice Genevoix. He is the author of La Tranchée de Calonne (The Calonne Trench) (La Table Ronde, 2007), Le Corps de la France (The body of France) (La Table Ronde 2010), and La Grande Guerre vue du ciel, (The Great War seen from above) (Perrin, 2013), a significant public and critical success.