The Toll of the Exodus — How Many French?

In the summer of 1940, once France has been fixed by the armistices, the administration tries to assess the scale of the exodus — the largest population displacement in the history of Western Europe in the twentieth century. The sources are scattered: prefectoral registers, communal censuses, SNCF reports, accounts from the host cities (Bordeaux, Toulouse, Pau, Limoges, Périgueux).

Three major unknowns arise. How many people left their homes between May and June 1940? How many died on the way — strafings, exhaustion, accidents, lost children? How many returned home before the end of the year? The estimate conditions the management of returns, supply, and aid to separated families.

Figures are all the more lacking because many fugitives were never registered and because families remain dispersed in the autumn. The difficulty of quantification is real, in a country administratively disorganised. The stake is not merely statistical: it is a matter of measuring a national trauma founding the memory of 1940.