Louis Barthas | |
|---|---|
.png) Barthas in 1914 | |
| Born | 14 July 1879 Homps, Aude, France |
| Died | 4 May 1952 (aged 72) Peyriac-Minervois, France |
| Branch |  French Army |
| Years of service | 1914–1919 |
| Rank | Corporal |
| Unit |
|
| Conflict | World War I |
Louis Barthas (French pronunciation: [lwi baʁta]; 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, an anti-militarist and a 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.