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Origin and history

The Ossuary of Douaumont was designed after the Armistice of 1918 by Bishop Charles Ginisty, Bishop of Verdun, to honour the 300,000 deaths of the Battle of 1916. Funded by an international subscription (122 French cities, 18 foreigners, donations from Canada and the United States), its first stone was laid in 1920 by Marshal Pétain. The project of architects Léon Azema, Max Edrei and Jacques Hardy, inspired by Roman art, symbolizes a sword planted in the ground.

Inaugurated in 1932 by President Albert Lebrun, the ossuary houses the remains of 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers, visible through windows. Its 137-metre cloister, decorated with 4,000 engraved names and stained glass by Georges Desvallières, leads to a Catholic chapel decorated by Élie-Jean Vézien. The 46-metre tower, surmounted by the Bourdon de la Victoire (two-ton log), offers a view of the necropolis of 16,142 graves, including a Muslim square and a Jewish memorial.

Ranked a historic monument in 1996, the site became a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation after the handshake Mitterrand-Kohl in 1984. In 2023, he integrated UNESCO World Heritage among 139 memorial sites of the Great War. The necropolis, created in 1923, brings together bodies exhumed from the battlefields until the 1930s, with perpetual concessions renewed by the state.

The architecture mixes reinforced concrete with pink granite, while the tower museum exhibits weapons and uniforms. Profaned in 2012, the monument was renovated between 2011 and 2014 for centennial commemorations. In 2014, the name of a German soldier, Peter Freundl, was engraved there for the first time, marking a milestone in shared memory.

The ossuary is run by the state and an association, with one of the highest attendances in the Great East. It inspires art (tamp of 2006, clip by Florent Pagny in 2014) and remains a place of pilgrimage for families and heads of state, as in 2008 for the 90th anniversary of the Armistice.

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