A region under the spotlight. After Le Bazar de la Charité, TF1 launched Les Combattantes, its brand new historical series, on September 19. Directed by Alexandre Laurent, the fiction highlights the journey of four women with exceptional destinies during the First World War. And the least we can say is that the first two episodes were a success. Indeed, according to Médiamétrie, fiction has imposed itself at the top of the audiences by bringing together 5.14 million curious people in front of their screen, and this, despite the strong competition in the first part of the evening with L’amour est dans le pré on M6 and the launch of the fourth season of the series Les rivières pourpres on France 2.
If the success of the series owes to its screenplay and its 5-star cast, it also owes it to the choice of locations for filming. Three regions of France served as the setting for the TF1 event series, including Hauts-de-France (for the setting of the convent), Ile-de-France (for the interior scenes and those of planes in studio) and in the Grand-Est region in particular in the Vosges (mainly for outdoor stages).
In the first two episodes, several towns in the Vosges were highlighted, in particular those of Plombière-les-Bains, La Vôge-les-Bains and Senones. For a week, the facades of store fronts in Plombière-les-Bains were completely transformed, making rue Stanislas and place du Bain Romain unrecognizable. A metamorphosis which aims to make the city look like a real village of 1914. In La Vôge-les-Bains, the site of the royal factory was mainly occupied for nearly 10 days.
In Senones, the film crews used several locations in town for the location shots. Contacted by Planet, an employee of the intercommunal tourist office of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges detailed the different locations chosen for the filming: “The enclosure of the abbey, the church, the cloister and part of the historic center which extends towards the castles, place Clémenceau”. “It lasted a little over a month. This is the city where they stayed the longest to shoot,” she said.
Discover through our slideshow the main places of the Vosges which served as exterior filming plans for the historical fiction of TF1.
