Champvoux: The Memory of Antoine Desforges and the Great War

Champvoux. Memory work on the Great War. His name was Antoine Desforges, a farmer in Champvoux. Like millions of others, he was drawn into the fatal whirlwind of the Great War. Like millions of others, he never returned, leaving behind a wife and two children. Thanks to the kids at the Champvoux school, he emerged, in his own way, from a certain anonymity. At the initiative of the ONaCVG (National Office for Combatants and War Victims), they took part in a competition entitled The little artists of memory, the view of children on the Great War .

On a very simple concept, we invited them, like other schoolchildren in France, to appropriate the history of the conflict by developing an artistic production on the itinerary of a soldier on the front, supervised by their teacher. The children of CM 1 and CM 2 of the class of Laurie Guichard-Boulay, coming from the three communes of the RPI (Champvoux, La Marche, Raveau) then imagined the production of a short six-minute film.

In this short film, they staged themselves, dressing as they did at the time, retracing the life of the peasants of the time, imagining the departure of this 30-year-old man from the station of La Charité-sur-Loire , with a smile on his face, for a war that everyone imagined to be very brief. Just enough time to beat the “Boches” as they said then. We then see them rushing to the attack, like the kids of The War of the Buttons . Except that for Antoine Desforges, everything ended on August 23, 1916, in Tahure, a town in the Marne department, destroyed during the First World War. The very one that Guillaume Apollinaire evokes in a poem. The one who was mobilized within the 85 ^e infantry regiment of Cosne-sur-Loire rests at the national cemetery of the Farm of Suippes.

From documents researched by Jean-Luc Lefebvre and Patrick Tréchot, it is a very beautiful work of memory which was carried out.

And last Monday, when Nicolas Robert, director of the ONaCVG of Nièvre, came to reward them, he announced to them that they would represent the region at the national level. Thus, thanks to the children, Antoine Desforges will no longer be just a name on the war memorial in the town of Champvoux.