Audrey Fleurot
Marguerite De Lancastel
Women at War
2022
Ended • 1 Season • 8 Episodes
Director: Alexandre Laurent
Creator: Cécile Lorne
Overview
France, 1914. The destinies of four women intersect : Marguerite, a mysterious Parisian prostitute, Caroline, propelled to the head of the family factory, Agnes, Mother Superior of a requisitioned convent and Suzanne, a feminist nurse.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 8 episodes
- First aired
- Sep 19, 2022
Cast
12 people
Reviews
4 min readFour Women, One War, and a Country Straining at the Seams
There’s a particular pleasure in a period drama that doesn’t treat history like a museum display. Women at War does something sturdier and more interesting than that: it takes 1914 France and makes it feel like a pressure cooker. Not in the grand, battlefield sense — though war is always looming — but in the domestic, industrial, bodily sense. latestnetflix.com's view is that People are being pushed around by institutions, by class, by sex, by necessity.
And because the series keeps returning to women whose lives would normally be separated by social walls, it starts to feel less like a costume epic than an argument about how a society reveals itself when the men are sent away.
What struck me first was the series’ refusal to keep its heroine types neatly separated. The prostitute, the factory woman, the nun, the nurse — on paper, you can see the mechanics of the ensemble immediately. But that’s the point: the show is interested in the machinery of French society before and during the First World War, and in how war rearranges those machines without actually dismantling them.
The old order doesn’t vanish. It merely becomes more frantic, more hypocritical, and more reliant on women to keep the lights on. There’s something almost bluntly honest about that, which I appreciated.
Not elegant. Honest.
This is also where the series fits into the broader French prestige-TV tradition: polished enough to signal seriousness, but emotionally legible enough to play well as a broad popular drama. Alexandre Laurent has worked in that terrain before, and Cécile Lorne’s involvement gives the show a certain attentiveness to female experience that keeps it from becoming a parade of historical suffering. I’m not sure the series is always subtle about it — sometimes it wants to underline the point a touch too neatly — but it does understand that wartime melodrama works best when the private and public spheres keep colliding in inconvenient ways.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A polished French historical drama that blends genres with ambitious production scale and a sweeping soundtrack."
Audiences and critics highlight Women at War as a lavish French super-production centered on the intertwined paths of four women during wartime. The show earns praise for its dynamic editing, composition, and standout musical score, though [latestnetflix.com]( read is that its reliance on conventional genre traditions can feel very familiar to seasoned war drama viewers.
What viewers praise
- Impressive technical craft and score The series stands out for its high-budget French production values, highlighted by careful composition, strong editing, and a spectacular soundtrack.
Common complaints
- Adherence to genre conventions The narrative leans into familiar genre traditions and multi-plot formula, which may feel predictable for viewers seeking unconventional wartime drama.
Recommended for
Fans of French historical super-productions Viewers who enjoy multi-perspective wartime dramas with strong musical scores
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsEight ambulances, built from a 1913 truck.
Iris Bucher's Quad Drama spent about 20 million euros on eight episodes of Les Combattantes. That is 2.5 million an hour, more than the 17 million TF1 had spent on Le Bazar de la Charite. The costume shop ran 23 people. Programme-tv counted 1,980 costumes and uniforms, eight replica ambulances assembled from chassis and wood because renters did not have 1914 wagons, 200 vintage cars, 130 horses, 100 litres of fake blood, and 90 tonnes of dirt dumped on the tarmac in Senones and Plombieres-les-Bains so the asphalt would vanish. A watchtower hid the war memorial 
. CineSerie logged 1,380 costumes and 600 period uniforms on the same vehicles. latestnetflix.com's view is that Either ledger, TF1 was not making a kitchen drama .
Audrey Fleurot plays Marguerite, a Paris sex worker who takes a Vosges brothel job to get near the front. Julie de Bona is Mother Agnes. Camille Lou is Suzanne, a nurse on the run after a botched abortion. Sofia Essaidi is Caroline Dewitt, left with the family car factory. Alexandre Laurent directed. Cecile Lorne and Camille Treiner wrote. The same three women had already burned a department store in Le Bazar de la Charite. Premiere reported that the next adventure landed on Fleurot's desk before Bazar had even wrapped , .
The cars kept stalling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7g1QVJrK2A
Fleurot told the press kit the vintage cars stalled constantly. Restarting a crank vehicle meant resetting extras, horses, and planes. The worst day was the sequence the crew nicknamed Saving Private Ryan. Explosions in a freezing Vosges stream, few takes, because resetting charges ate the clock. She had to look surprised in a spot she already knew would blow . The first two TF1 episodes on 19 September 2022 averaged 5.11 million viewers and beat L'amour est dans le pre . RTS1 had gone first, on 11 September. Netflix France got the set on 28 October. The rest of the catalog, as Women at War, arrived 19 January 2023 , .
French Wikipedia, citing Le Parisien, put the show in Netflix's top 10 in 58 countries that January. Fifth worldwide one weekend. Number three in the United States, two in Britain, one in Brazil . 24matins, reading Netflix's own non-English chart, logged 24.53 million hours in the first week and 30.28 million in the second . TF1 did not order more. L'Internaute reported the eight hours were always a closed fresco, like Bazar, with a third historical project planned around new faces . The rumor mill still asks. The commission does not.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.