20 Facts About Lazare Ponticelli

Lazare Ponticelli worked with the French Resistance against the Nazis.

Lazare Ponticelli was the oldest living man of Italian birth and the oldest man living in France at the time of his death.

Lazare Ponticelli's father sold livestock on the fairgrounds and occasionally worked as a carpenter and cobbler.

Lazare Ponticelli's mother cultivated the family's small plot of land and, like many women of the area, commuted three times a year to the Po Valley to work in its rice fields.

When Lazare Ponticelli was two years of age, his mother moved to France to earn a better living.

At age six, Lazare Ponticelli started several jobs, including making clogs.

Lazare Ponticelli rediscovered his older brother, Celeste Ponticelli, who had joined the same regiment.

Lazare Ponticelli served at Soissons in Picardy, northeast France, and at Douaumont, near Verdun.

Lazare Ponticelli was not a French citizen and in May 1915, when Italy entered the war, he was conscripted into the Italian Army.

At his new post as a machine gunner, Lazare Ponticelli was seriously wounded by a shell during an assault on an Austrian mountain position.

Lazare Ponticelli was returned to his post after rest and recuperation in Naples.

In 1918 Lazare Ponticelli was gassed in an Austrian attack that killed hundreds of his fellow soldiers.

Lazare Ponticelli continued managing the company with his brothers until his retirement in 1960.

Lazare Ponticelli now operates in several countries outside France, mainly across Europe and Africa.

Until his death, Lazare Ponticelli lived with his daughter in the Paris suburb of Le Kremlin-Bicetre, and every 11 November until 2007 he attended Armistice Day ceremonies.

An honored citizen of his adopted town, Lazare Ponticelli voted in the 2007 presidential and legislative elections.

Lazare Ponticelli officially became a supercentenarian on 24 December 2007, celebrating his official 110th birthday at the National History of Immigration Museum.

When originally offered a state funeral by then French President Jacques Chirac, Lazare Ponticelli asserted that he did not want one, although the death of the penultimate recognized soldier, Louis de Cazenave, on 20 January 2008 caused him to reconsider.

At the time of his death, Lazare Ponticelli was the oldest living man of Italian birth and the oldest man living in France.

Lazare Ponticelli had at least one child, his then-78-year-old daughter, Janine Desbaucheron.