Iran, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, and even Sudan… Conflicts never marked our daily lives as much as today. Wars saturate the news and photographs of these tragedies flood newspapers and social networks. The common theme in these photos is the focus on one thing: the ruins. This is what the temporary exhibition “Silence after the impact” installed until July 12th at the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Memorial’14-18 near Lens in Pas-de-Calais, a territory completely destroyed during the First World War, deciphers.
The cities of Nord-Pas-de-Calais devastated, houses destroyed, barely standing churches… The starting point of this exhibition, “Silence after the Impact,” is obviously the Great War. Black and white photographs represent soldiers in the destroyed streets of Arras or Lens, or civilians trying to live amidst the debris. “The Nord-Pas de Calais was almost entirely destroyed during the First World War,” confirms Juliette Gouesnard, programming manager at the Memorial. She recalls that at that time, it was difficult for photojournalists to capture combat scenes due to their heavy equipment, about 80 kilos. Ruins then became a way to witness the horror of the conflict. “The ruin was sometimes an easy subject to handle with these photographic constraints and was also a way to show the war without showing bodies because there was censorship. We avoided showing bodies to avoid demoralizing the people and the troops,” she explains.
Another bloody center, but less known from the First World War, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette also houses a necropolis where more than 42,000 combatants rest: French, Americans, British, Canadians, and Germans. An “Ring of Peace” was erected in 2014, inscribed with the names of the over 580,000 soldiers who fell in Artois between 1914 and 1918. This memorial, this exhibition, is also a way to remind visitors of the consequences and magnitude of the Great War. “It is a duty of awareness, a duty of memory. One hundred years later, it is a place, despite being frozen in time, still active militarily and religiously. The most striking example is on the hill of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where there is at least one burial each year. The most recent ceremony was in July 2025, where six soldiers of the French army were buried in the necropolis,” details Benoît Vienne.
And a hundred years after the end of this conflict, 700,000 combatants are still missing on all the battlefields in the North and East of France.
