A French Genocide: The Vendée provides a detailed narrative of the civil war in the Vendée region of western France, which lasted for much of the 1790s but was most intensely fought at the height of the Reign of Terror, from March 1793 to early 1795. In this shocking and controversial book, Reyanld Secher argues that the massacres which resulted from the conflict between "patriotic" revolutionary forces and those of the counter-revolution were not the inevitable result of fierce battle, but rather were "premeditated, committed in cold blood, massive and systematic, and undertaken with the conscious and proclaimed will to destroy a well-defined region, and to exterminate an entire people." Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Secher argues that more than 14 percent of the population and 18 percent of the housing stock in the Vendée was destroyed in this catastrophic conflict. Secher's review of the social and political structure of the region presents a dramatically different image of the people on the Vendée than the stereotype common among historians favorable to the French Revolution. He demonstrates that they were not archaic and superstitious or even necessarily adverse to the forward-looking forces of the Revolution. Rather, the region turned against the Revolution because of a series of misguided policy choices that failed to satisfy the desire for reform and offended the religious sensibilities of the Vendéans. Using an array of primary sources, many from provincial archives, including personal accounts and statistical data, Secher convincingly argues for a demythologized view of the French Revolution. Contrary to most twentieth-century academic accounts of the Revolution, which have either ignored, apologized for, or explained away the Vendée, Secher demonstrates that the vicious nature of this civil war is a key element that forces us to reconsider the revolutionary regime. His work, available for the first time in English, provides a significant case study for readers interested in the relationships between religion, region, and political violence.

FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED The massacre of 1 million Rwandan Tutsis by ethnic Hutus in 1994 has become a symbol of the international community's helplessness in the face of human rights atrocities. It is assumed that the West was well-intentioned, but ultimately ineffectual. But as Andrew Wallis reveals in this shocking book, one country - France - was secretly providing military, financial and diplomatic support to the genocidaires all along. Based on new interviews with key players and eye-witnesses, and previously unreleased documents, Walliss' book tells a story which many have suspected, but never seen set out before. France, Wallis discovers, was keen to defend its influence in Africa, even if it meant complicity in genocide, for as French President Francois Mitterrand once said: "in countries like that, genocide is not so important". Wallis's riveting expose of the French role in one of the darkest chapters of human history will provoke furious debate, denials, and outrage.

Events in Rwanda in 1994 mark a landmark in the history of modern genocide. Up to one million people were killed in a planned public and political campaign. In the face of indisputable evidence, the Security Council of the United Nations failed to respond. In this classic of investigative journalism, Linda Melvern tells the compelling story of what happened. She holds governments to account, showing how individuals could have prevented what was happening and didn't do so. The book also reveals the unrecognised heroism of those who stayed on during the genocide, volunteer peacekeepers and those who ran emergency medical care. Fifteen years on, this new edition examines the ongoing impact of the 1948 Genocide Convention and the shock waves Rwanda caused around the world. Based on fresh interviews with key players and newly-released documents, A People Betrayed is a shocking indictment of the way Rwanda is and was forgotten and how today it is remembered in the West.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

Did Napoleon provide the model for Hitler's Final Solution?140 years before the Holocaust, Napoleon used gas to exterminate the civil population of the Antilles, he created concentration camps in Corsica and Alba, and he re-established the slave trade, provoking the deaths of over 200,000 Africans in the French colonies. In this riveting and controversial expose, Ribbe reveals Napoleon's shocking legacy to the atrocities of the twentieth century.

Between the French defeat in 1940 and liberation in 1944, the Nazis killed almost 80,000 of France's Jews, both French and foreign. Since that time, this tragedy has been well-documented. But there are other stories hidden within it-ones neglected by historians. In fact, 75% of France's Jews escaped the extermination, while 45% of the Jews of Belgium perished, and in the Netherlands only 20% survived. The Nazis were determined to destroy the Jews across Europe, and the Vichy regime collaborated in their deportation from France. So what is the meaning of this French exception? Jacques Semelin sheds light on this 'French enigma', painting a radically unfamiliar view of occupied France. His is a rich, even-handed portrait of a complex and changing society, one where helping and informing on one's neighbours went hand in hand; and where small gestures of solidarity sat comfortably with anti-Semitism. Without shying away from the horror of the Holocaust's crimes, this seminal work adds a fresh perspective to our history of the Second World War.