When I hear on the news channels our policies rehash their "Attachment to the values ​​of the Republic"I can not help but think of the 150,000 Vendeans massacred in the name of the said Republic. Men, women, children, old men, murdered by the armies of the Republic because they were only wrong to be born Vendeans. Massacres that foreshadow, a hundred and fifty years earlier, the crimes of the Third Reich: organization of mass drownings of civilians, use of bread ovens to burn villagers alive, and even the first attempt at mass gassing ... The French Republic accepted the creation tanneries of human skin to make bags and pants in Vendée skin, and their fat was used to make soap. In Noirmoutier, it is quite simply the first camp of extermination of the modern history which was created.

Certainly, over the centuries, France has been guilty of many abuses: crusade against the Albigenses, persecution of Protestants, slave trade, state anti-Semitism ... But only the massacres of Vendée, thought and organized since Paris, are still concealed. They are not taught in textbooks, nor treated in the movies or in TV movies produced by our public television. Yet, in recent years, things have changed. And if some consider these crimes as the first modern genocide, it is thanks to the abnegation of a man: Reynald Secher.

In 1985, this 30-year-old Nantais is supporting a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne entitled Contribution to the study of the Franco-French genocide: the Vendée-Vengé. He shows that the massacres committed by the representatives of the Convention in 1793 and 1794 constitute genocide. The jury, which includes Pierre Chaunu and Jean Tulard, awarded him "very honorable". The thesis is published the following year by the Puf, sells 80,000 copies and is translated in Europe and the United States.

It's an electroshock. Until then, the Vendée wars were presented as a campaign of pacification, with their share of abuses and overflows, but in no way as a genocide. The use of this word provokes a lively controversy in the university milieu, where the influence of Marxist thought is preponderant at this time and the defenders of the Terror are legion. The specialists of Robespierre rebel. Secher is under pressure and threats. He was robbed a fortnight before the defense and even offered him 500,000 francs and a post at the university not to support his thesis. For having refused to submit to the injunctions, the historian will see his career broken.

The detailed study of the massacres shows that the emissaries of the Republic have implemented a real extermination policy led by General Turreau (and its infernal columns) and Jean-Baptiste Carrier in Nantes. On December 12, 1793, the latter wrote: "He enters into my projects, and these are the orders of the National Convention, to remove all food, food, fodder, all in a word in this accursed country, to burn all the buildings, to Exterminate all the inhabitants ... " This industry of death was denounced in its time by the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, author in 1795 of a pamphlet entitled the Vendée War and the depopulation system, in which he forged the concept of "populicide", a precursor of "genocide".

Despite the caution of many historians or intellectuals, the genocide Vendéen has never been recognized by the French state. Since 2007, three legislative proposals have been made to this effect by parliamentarians. In vain. The Terror still has its supporters, and the name of General Turreau, the Eichmann of the Vendée, remains engraved on the Arc de Triomphe ...

How can France hope to compel Turkey to recognize the Armenian genocide by prohibiting its challenge, while at the same time it stubbornly denies that of the Vendeans?