Louis Barthas, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetLouis Barthas
French World War I veteran and writer
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Homps, Occitania, France
About Louis Barthas
- Louis Barthas (French pronunciation: ?[lwi ba?ta]; 14 July 1879 – 4 May 1952) was a French infantry corporal who served on the Western Front of World War I for nearly the entire duration of conflict, stationed on the front lines for a significant amount of time.
- He was a politically active socialist and professional barrelmaker. Barthas extensively documented his wartime experiences.
- After the war, he set out to compile these into a series of notebooks, forming a single comprehensive manuscript.
- He did not think to have them published, and the notebooks were kept in the back of a drawer for the next couple of decades. His grandson, a teacher at a secondary school in Carcassonne, consigned the notebooks to a colleague history teacher who used them in his curriculum.
- Word of mouth brought renewed attention to Barthas' manuscript, and in 1978, sixty years after the war, it was published as Poilu: the World War I notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, barrelmaker, 1914–1918.
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