The Socialist leader announced that France will make an unprecedented invitation to all 72 countries involved in the Great War to take part in its annual Bastille Day military parade in July next year.
Bastille Day on July 14 will fall just before the 100th anniversary of the start of the 1914-18 conflict.
Mr Hollande also revealed that Germany’s President, Joachim Gauck, will come to France for a ceremony on August 3 next year - exactly a century after the two countries declared war on each other.
"I asked the president of the Federal Republic (Germany) Mr Gauck to come to France on the occasion of the commemoration of this tragic act, he has accepted and I thank him for that,” Mr Hollande said in a speech at the Elysée launching the centenary.
"All 72 countries that we can call belligerents of the Great War will be invited to take part in the parade on the Champs-Elysees.
"They will be gathered together for an unprecedented national festival - unprecedented because it will be international.
"There will be soldiers in their uniforms with their flags but young civilians will also take part in what will be a great demonstration for peace.”
The Elysée also revealed that war dead from among the allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary will receive equal treatment when a memorial is built in Notre Dame des Lorettes in the Pas-de-Calais, northern France. Some 600,000 soldiers who died on the battlefield in the area will have their names listed in alphabetical order, whether allies or enemies, regardless of nationality.
None of the soldiers who fought in the trenches are still alive, but the conflict still resonates deeply in Europe, where millions of men died in the “war to end all wars.”
The theatre of much of the fighting, France lost 1.4 million men in combat.
Around 9 million troops were killed, and some 20 million injured, before Germany signed an armistice with the victorious Allies in November 1918.
"There is no municipality in France that did not have victims in World War I,” Mr Hollande said, calling it “the hardest trial that the French population had ever known.”
He also promised to create a space commemorating soldiers who were shot for cowardice and desertion in war to be built at Paris war museum in Les Invalides.
A recent historians’ report, commissioned by the government, called for the cases of 650 men shot during the war to be reconsidered.
Many of them are “worthy and deserving of moral, civic and public-spirited rehabilitation", the report said.
It is expected that the veterans’ minister will recognise within the commemorations that many of those who were executed were shot in “rushed, sometimes arbitrary conditions".
Mr Hollande’s speech came amid growing anger in France over the country's economic woes,, which recently spilt over into anti-tax riots in the western region of Brittany.
With a fresh poll out yesterday placing Mr Hollande as the most unpopular president in half a century, he said the memory of the Great War underscores “the pressing need to unite if we want to the win the battles, which today are no longer military but economic, and which threaten our destiny and our place in the world.”
He said the war effort “reminds us of the strength of a nation when we stand together". He said today’s call to arms was “to reform, to unite, to succeed.”
With the far-Right Front National surging in the polls ahead of municipal and European elections next year, the Socialist also sent a message to immigrants, He said France has an obligation to help the descendants of troops from former African and Asian colonies, who had put their lives on the line for France.
Over 1,500 World War I centenary projects and events are planned over the coming year.