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.

Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, was a French general who served as Commander-in-Chief of French forces on the Western Front from the start of World War I until the end of 1916. He is best known for regrouping the retreating allied armies to defeat the Germans at the strategically decisive First Battle of the Marne in September 1914.