On Saturday 5 May 2018, in the village of Marches, near Chambéry (South-Eastern France), the names of 27 local soldiers killed in action were finally honoured after two centuries of obscurity when a memorial plaque was installed next to the existing war memorial in the village.
The names of these 27 young men, who gave their lives fighting for the First Republic and later the First Empire under Napoleon I between 1792-1815, had previously been completely forgotten, and were uncovered after more than three years of painstaking work by Ghislain Garlatti, a local historian, and President of the ‘Souvenir Français de Montmélian’, a local historical group dedicated to honouring fallen French soldiers. The research undertaken by Ghislain Garlatti uncovered that 72 of the 700 inhabitants of Marches served first the Republic and later the Empire between 1792-1815, and the historian estimates that, beyond the village bounds, another 7,000 Savoyard fighters were also killed in action.