It is within the calling of The Historial de la Grande Guerre to situate the specific nature of the bloodiest battle of the First World War in the overall context of the conflict. By way of comparison, the Battle of Verdun caused the lost (dead, wounded, missing) of 337,000 Germans and 362,000 Frenchmen. The losses at the Battle of the Somme totalled 400,000 for the British, 335,000 for the Germans and 200,000 for the French.

The idea of creating a museum devoted to the 1914-1918 war originated with the Somme County Council in 1986.The project was envisioned in the context of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, which involved combatants from more than twenty nations of the world at that time. The museum was inaugurated on 16 July 1992. The Corbusier-inspired architecture of the white concrete structure designed by Henri Edouard Ciriani is subtly built onto the brick château through which visitors enter. The Historial de la Grande Guerre was selected among the twenty ‘Major Cultural Projects in France’ of the time for the quality of its architecture.

The interior architecture and the museography chosen for the five main rooms illustrate at once life at the front and behind the lines. The weapons and military gear are displayed in the centre of the rooms: placed in shallow pits on the floor, it stresses the common suffering of the combatants.

This recent trilingual (English, French, German) museum is neither a memorial nor a military museum but a museum of mentalities which seeks to show how the cultural representations of combatants and civilians were drastically modified by the war. On the very sites of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the Battle of Picardy in 1918, the Historial de la Grande Guerre attempts to provide keys for understanding these events in all their dimensions and in so doing, to encourage reflection on the consequences of these battles and the material traces, which survive today.

Find out more at : www.historial.org