The identity of the Unknown Soldier has never been formally given.Īs stated above, Francis Simon, a printer and president of a local section of Le Souvenir Français, is widely regarded as the person who came up with the idea, though this is disrupted by World War One historian Erwann Le Gall, from Brest University, who told Ouest France it is “absurd” to suggest he came up with it on his own, and that the idea had no doubt been “germinating” earlier.
It is revived each day in a ceremony at 18:30. It was lit on November 11, 1923, by Mr Maginot, then War Minister, and has never gone out. To make sure the tomb was remembered, a journalist suggested in 1923 that an eternal flame be lit there. The tomb is composed of a slab of granite from Vire in Normandy that bears the epitaph: “Here lies a French soldier who died for the Fatherland 1914-1918”, surrounded by 18 small pillars intertwined with chains that frame what the veterans call ‘the sacred slab’. "The coffin arrived at the Arc de Triomphe on November 11, 1920, where it first stayed in a room before being buried under the Arc on January 28, 1921," said Quentin Bendavid, technician of the cultural services of the Arc de Triomphe, in a video on Youtube. Mr Thin was later awarded the French Legion d’honneur by former Socialist president François Mitterrand in 1982 at the Arc de Triomphe, months before he died. Out of the line of coffins, he chose the sixth, saying later that he picked it because his military unit was the sixth, and six was also the number obtained by adding up the individual figures of his regiment’s number, 132. "I was chosen because I was the youngest enlisted 2nd class soldier and a veteran of the regiment of Verdun, the 132nd RI,” Mr Thin explained at the time. was invited by Mr Maginot to choose one by placing a bunch of lillies on it. The remains of eight soldiers from different battle grounds were brought in oak coffins and one of the soldiers designated to guard them, 21-year-old Auguste Thin. Then Pensions Minister André Maginot, himself a war veteran, chose the underground military base Citadelle de Verdun for a ceremony to choose the soldier's body on November 10, 1920. There was debate as to the location, with some suggesting the Panthéon, however veterans’ associations supported the Arc de Triomphe. It was supported by the press, and adopted by MPs in 1919.
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