Olivier Saint-Hilaire

This thesis project in social sciences proposes a global approach to industrial pollution caused by munitions and the destruction of munitions during the Great War and the Second World War. The aim is to shed light on a subject that has been little studied until now: the cleaning of battlefields, the recovery of unexploded projectiles and the industrial de-munitions of the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars.

The aim of this thesis is to understand the social, economic, sanitary and environmental impacts of war over the long term through the study of various public policies and the use of private industrial initiative to “disarm” the soil in post-war situations. The objectives of this study are to identify and characterize :

• industrial pollution, polluted sites linked to the burial, dumping or destruction of munitions
• the actors and practices of demining
  all the management methods for polluted soils and “war waste” as well as
• the remediation solutions implemented over the last century, taking into account their long-term evolution

The aim of this environmental, economic and anthropological study is to contribute to a better understanding of the history of the pollution concerned and to give a new perspective to current and future clean-up policies, by comparing them to the policies followed for more than a century, and to prevent the emergence of new polluted sites.