Le Souvenir français is a French association for maintaining war memorials and war memory, comparable to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

It was created in 1887 in the departments of Alsace and Lorraine. Young women in traditional dress had been furtively placing cockades on soldiers' tombs. An Alsatian professor, Xavier Niessen, against Prussian orders in these departments, was keen to show his membership of the French fatherland and thought that remembering those who had died for France allowed the feeling of national unity to be maintained. Thus, on 7 March 1888 he summoned the French to join his new association, which then had a highly active period.

It is one of France's oldest associations d’utilité publique (being recognised as such on 1 February 1906) and has three aims:

Many of its supporters were mobilised in the First World War, with the remaining ones looking after war graves and accompanying the families of the war dead on visits to them. The association was then in charge of 88,000 burials from the Franco-Prussian War and could only handle 1,700,000 burials of dead from the First World War. Thus the law of 31 July 1920 created the "service national des sépultures", took charge of military cemeteries and organised nationals necropolises. After the Second World War general Lacapelle, president of Le Souvenir Français, demanded the identification of 100,000 French soldiers who had died the battle of France and the maintenance of their tombs.

René Goscinny (14 August 1926 – 5 November 1977) was an award-winning French comics editor and writer, who is best known for the comic book Astérix, which he created with illustrator Albert Uderzo, and for his work on the comic series Lucky Luke with Morris (considered the series' golden age) and Iznogoud with Jean Tabary.

Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926, to a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland; his parents were Stanisław Simkha Gościnny (the surname means hospitable in Polish, Simkha is his Jewish name meaning happiness), a chemical engineer from Warsaw, Poland, and Anna (Hanna) Bereśniak-Gościnna from Chodorków, a small village near Zhitomir, in the Second Polish Republic, now Ukraine. Claude, René's older brother was born 6 years earlier; on 10 December 1920. Stanisław and Anna had met in Paris and married in 1919. The Gościnnys moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, two years after René's birth, because of a chemical engineer post Stanisław had obtained there. He spent a happy childhood in Buenos Aires, and studied in the French schools there. He had a habit of being the "Class Clown", probably to compensate for a natural shyness. He started drawing very early on, inspired by the illustrated stories which he enjoyed reading.