The cemetery was created during the First World War and redeveloped in 1920, 1922 and from 1925-1929, when French soldiers were exhumed and brought here as a final resting place from the Flanders Front, the Yser river region and the Belgian coast.

There are 3,547 named military dead including the remains of 609 soldiers in the ossuary.  After the Great War many of the unidentified French soldiers were exhumed and reinterred in the ossuary at Le Mont-Kemmel.

The cemetery is 29,900 square metres in size. The French national flag flies in the centre of the cemetery.