French territory, mostly north-east France along the border with Belgium and Luxembourg, was under military occupation by the German Empire during World War I. This entailed various impositions on the population, including malnutrition, forced labor, and requisitions of property, services, and goods.

Territory occupied The territory occupied by Germany at the end of 1914 included 10 départements in part or in full, includingː

70% of the Nord department; 25% of Pas-de-Calais; 16% of the Somme; 55% of the Aisne; 12% of Marne; 30% of Meuse; 25% of Meurthe-et-Moselle; 4.8% of Vosges; 100% of Ardennes.

These territories constituted 3.7% of the area and 8.2% of the population of France itself with about 2 million inhabitants.

The current departments of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, and Moselle, which were part of the German Reich from 1871 until their return to France at the end of the war in November 1918, are not included among the occupied territories.

The vast majority of the territory of neighboring Belgium was also occupied, with the exception of the western part of maritime Flanders, around Ypres. However, the Franco-Belgian border was maintained and the crossings controlled.

Part of Picardy was temporarily liberated in 1917 but the border area remained under German domination for four years: Lille for 1,465 days, Laon for 1,502 days, and Roubaix from October 14, 1914, to October 17, 1918.

The occupied zone was under military administration but some territories were assigned a particular status. The northern part of the valley of the Meuse River (including Givet and Fumay) was attached to the General Government of Belgium; the district of Briey was placed under German civil authority until December 1916, and was then subject to the military governor of Metz. The population of this area greatly decreased during this period due to both the excessive mortality relative to births as well as deportations and voluntary migration to unoccupied France. Thus, the department of the Ardennes, which had 319,000 inhabitants before the war, counted only 175,000 at the time of liberation. The population of Lille fell from 217,000 inhabitants at the beginning of 1914 to 112,000 in October 1918 and that of Roubaix from 122,723 to 77,824, while Tourcoing's population fell from 82,644 to 58,674. Some localities near the front and some towns in the Ardennes were emptied of the majority of their population. At the end of the war, Rethel had only 1,600 inhabitants, compared to 5,187 in 1911.

For the whole of the occupied territory, the statistics of the Food Committee of the North of France indicate 2,235,467 inhabitants in 1915, but only 1,663,340 as of June 30, 1918; the decrease over the entire period beginning in the autumn of 1914 was even higher.

The majority of the population was made up of women, children and the elderly, with most of the men having been mobilized.

History Owing to the speed of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, fighting reached French soil early in the war. Though their advance was stopped at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914, the Germans gained control of a portion of French territory, which remained under German occupation behind the stabilized Western Front for much of the rest of the war.

While the stories of the battlefield gained notoriety after the end of the war, the suffering of the occupied populations was often relegated to obscurity.

Interest in the German occupation was in practice limited to the inhabitants of the affected areas in the years following the conflict.

Isolated territory

As soon as they arrived, the Germans hindered the movement of French residents and prevented the flow of information. Automobiles were requisitioned on October 15, 1914; next, bicycles, telephones and radio telegraphs were confiscated. Even pigeons had to be slaughtered for fear of transmission of messages by carrier pigeon.

Within the occupied territory, travel from one municipality to another required authorization from the German authorities and the issuing of a pass. Violations of these traffic rules could be punished with imprisonment or a fine. Such obstacles predictably increased the feeling of confinement for the French population.

Connections with unoccupied France were prohibited until April 1916. Only correspondence with relatives who were prisoners of war was authorized. It was limited to one card per month, and was also subject to censorship. Only half of the cards that passed through the Frankfurt Red Cross reached their recipients.

The publication of the prewar newspapers was also stopped, so the only periodicals available were the German propaganda newspaper La Gazette des Ardennes and the Bulletin de Lille, each published by the respective municipalities under German control. Even this was limited to practical and commercial information. Hence, news from the front could only filter through via underground newspapers with very low circulation or rumors. In practice, the majority of the population remained completely in the dark about external events.

Meanwhile, the occupied zone included some of the most industrialized parts of France: 64 percent of France's pig-iron production, 24 percent of its steel manufacturing and 40 percent of the total coal mining capacity was located in the zone, representing a major setback for the French industry. A number of important towns and cities were situated within it too, notably Lille, Douai, Cambrai, Valenciennes, Maubeuge and Avesnes. Partly because of its proximity to the front, occupied north-east France was ruled by the military, rather than by a civilian occupation administration. Economic exploitation of the occupied zone increased throughout the war. Forced labor became increasingly common as the war dragged on.

Living conditions The German occupation did not respect the Hague Convention of 1907, which defined the rules applicable to the occupation of a territory by an enemy army, due to looting and the imposition of forced labor that contributed to their own war effort.

Omnipresence of the Germans The Germans requisitioned most of the public buildings for their administration, the "Kommandantur" and for their troops; high schools and colleges were transformed into hospitals. Individual homes could at any time be requisitioned for soldiers. Large restaurants and places to relax were reserved exclusively for German troops, and military parades and concerts were organized. The proximity of the front (Lille was only fifteen kilometers away) generated constant troop movements. The larger cities became places of relaxation for soldiers on leave and, in Lille, those of the German General Staff. The considerable density of troops reached extreme proportions in localities such as Carvin with some 15,000 soldiers for 6,600 inhabitants.

Malnutrition

The shortage of food began shortly after the arrival of the occupying army. Germany itself, due to the British naval blockade of her ports, suffered from a lack of food and refused to support the populations of the occupied territories. This included almost all of Belgium, whose population totaled more than 10 million inhabitants. The Germans seized stocks as soon as they arrived and then made requisitions for the duration of the war. The Germans seized 80% of the 1915 wheat crop, and 75% of the potato crop. They also took the majority of the eggs and cattle. At the end of 1918, the livestock in the territories was reduced to a quarter compared to before the war. Famine loomed in the fall of 1914 and the question of food supplies was the main concern for the authorities in seeking aid from neutral countries.

The Mayor of Lille, , at first contacted Switzerland, on the advice of the Commander of the place, General von Heinrich. After this unsuccessful attempt, further steps led to an agreement signed on April 13, 1915 in Brussels between the Commission for Relief in Belgium, or CRB, and General von Bissing, the Senior Commander of the German Army in Belgium. This convention extended the food aid of the CRB, from which Belgium had benefited since October 22, 1914, to the populations of occupied France. The German army gave assurances that the goods would not be requisitioned. As in Belgium, the German authorities were interested in this aid, which avoided hunger riots and made it possible to continue levies on local agricultural production.

The CRB, funded by donations and grants from the United States Government, purchased food from the United States (42%), the British colonies (25%), Great Britain (24%), the Netherlands (9%) and a small quantity from France itself. Food imported into Belgium remained the property of the American Ambassador to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, until its distribution to the population.

Following Herbert Hoover's intervention with President Poincaré, France contributed to this aid by making payments to the Belgian government in exile (so that this indirect aid would be officially ignored by German authorities who actually knew about it). The financing of the CRB for a total amount of $700,000,000 throughout the war was provided at the level of $205,000,000 by the French Treasury $386,000,000 by the United States Treasury, $109,000,000 by the UK Treasury, and $52,000,000 of donations, mainly American).

The Food Committee of Northern France (CANF) was created under the patronage of the CRB and the National Relief and Food Committee (Belgian) for the distribution of food. Its administrative headquarters were in Brussels, and its executive committee chaired by Louis Guérin, a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Lille, at the Prefecture of the Nord département. Foodstuffs intended exclusively for distribution could not be traded. Offenses were punished with fines or imprisonment.

CANF included seven districts, in Lille, Valenciennes, Saint-Quentin, Marle, Tergnier, Fourmies and Longwy. Each commune had a local committee, warehouses and distribution offices. Lille had 60 offices, most of which were set up in schools, with the whole being managed by 800 civil servants. The municipalities paid for the supplies and passed on part of it to the inhabitants. The foodstuffs were transported from Belgium to depots mostly by river, due to rail transport being reserved for the German army. The aid of the CRB alleviated the shortage: its share in the supply is dominant in 1916, 1917 and 1918. The perception among prefects, the returnees, and in the general public was that "without American aid the population would have starved to death."

The food situation fluctuated; it deteriorated from October 1914 to April 1915; improved from the arrival of aid from the CRB in the spring of 1915; then deteriorated again from 1916. In Lille, the per capita daily rations fell to 1300 calories in 1917, then rose to 1400 in 1918 (intake in normal periods is on average of the order of 2800, a state of undernourishment is reached at below 2000). This insufficient amount of food was, moreover, unbalanced with severe deficiencies, particularly in vitamins.

The occupation of the city of Sedan and the difficult living situation were chronicled by Yves Congar who was only a child at the time. In his notebooks he describes the high inflation of food prices as well as the shortages affecting the territories occupied by the German army. Congar wrote on November 4, 1914, that "we don't have half a gram of bread left to eat."