President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "Today, I express the nation's deep emotion and infinite sadness."
Lazare Ponticelli was born on 7 December 1897 in Emilia Romagna, northern Italy, but aged only nine, he came to France to join his two brothers, and to work in Paris as a chimney sweep and paperboy.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that there would be a national day of remembrance for France's war dead in the coming days and that this would be fitting tribute in the light of the death of Lazare Ponticelli .
There are still a small number of surviving WWI veterans from other countries, and British pilot Henry Allingham and Austro-Hungarian artillery man Franz Kunstler are two of these, but France's other oldest surviving veteran, Louis de Cazenave, died in January, and he was 110 when he died too.
