The Commemorative medal of the 1870–1871 War was a French military campaign medal awarded to those who served during the Franco-Prussian War.

Noël Édouard, vicomte de Curières de Castelnau was a French army general, army group commander and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces during the First World War. Elected deputy in 1919 and president of the Army Commission in the legislature, he then took the head of a confessional political movement, the Fédération Nationale Catholique. During the Second World War, he opposed Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime and supported the French Resistance. For a long time controversial because of a Catholicism that was considered outrageous by his opponents, historians have moderated that portrait by emphasising his great loyalty to republican institutions and disputed in particular that he could have been reactionary or anti-Semitic.