For centuries, the idea of dying honorably for France was extraordinarily potent, reaching its peak during the First World War when 1.4 million French soldiers died in uniform. By the end of the twentieth century, however, public opinion had come to view the soldier's death as an unacceptable tragedy, and also as an essentially private affair. Dying for France seeks to understand that profound shift by considering the soldier's death from the Renaissance to the present. It alights on important episodes in French military history-during the Renaissance and Old Regime, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussia War and Paris Commune, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Algerian War-to consider the realities and the representations of military death.