History robed in reckless rhetoric

The French writer Ernest Renan once remarked that for nations to hold together, their citizens must collectively forget a great deal of history. Yet today, far from forgetting, countries are engaging in protracted bouts of remembrance, from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the opening of secret police archives in the former Eastern Bloc. Memory may not threaten unity in the way Renan feared. But it has often become a blunt instrument, wielded recklessly by those in search of recognition and recompense.

Reynald Secher’s book “A French Genocide: The Vendee” is a particularly blunt and ill-made instrument that caused considerable scandal when it first appeared in France in 1986. The story it recounted was not unknown: In the years 1793-94 France’s revolutionary First Republic used massively murderous means to suppress an uprising in the western Vendee region. But Secher, a young right-wing native of the region, made the new and inflammatory allegation that the actions amounted to genocide. Two leading conservative historians contributed fierce prefaces to the book, and one of them, Pierre Chaunu, went so far as to assert that the “sadistic imagination” of the revolutionaries matched that of the “SS, the Gulag and the Khmer Rouge.”

These charges stabbed deep into some of the most tender tissues of the French body politic. The ultra-Catholic, royalist Vendee revolt is a preeminent symbol of the traditional French extreme right, and in the 1980s, the fortunes of this political grouping had sunk to a historical low. Already discredited after World War II because of its support for the Nazi puppet regime in Vichy, it now had to deal with revelations about its willing complicity in the Final Solution, which led to sensational trials of former Vichy officials. (Acting without direct German pressure, Vichy had deported 76,000 Jews to their deaths.)

Following the publication of Secher’s book, the argument began to be heard that the French were obsessed with the wrong genocide, and the French far right deserved the status of victim, not perpetrator. Secher denied writing the book with this ulterior motive and went on to publish the study “Jews and Vendeans,” which affirmed the central place of the Holocaust in modern history. The English translation of “A French Genocide” has quietly dropped the provocative prefaces. Nonetheless, there is an unintended lesson in Secher’s book.

In contemporary politics, not only can historical memory serve as a blunt instrument, but in the resulting “memory wars,” the escalation of claims and counter-claims is also so overpowering that groups reach irresistibly for a great rhetorical trump card. And so group after group ends up measuring itself against, and even contending with, the Jews, whose misfortune it has been to serve as the paradigmatic victims of genocide. This development is poisonous, and it does little except to trivialize horrors and sufferings that the historian should explain and illuminate.

At first sight, “A French Genocide” did not seem to deserve all this attention. The book is awkwardly written and crudely argued; it begins with several utterly banal chapters on the history of the Vendee region and the origins of the uprising. Secher treads clumsily over familiar material as he describes the protests provoked by the revolution’s radical reform of the Catholic Church and by its introduction of conscription. But when he reaches the revolution’s ferocious attempts to “pacify” the region following the rebels’ military defeat, his horrific material seems to justify his incendiary charges. In quotation after quotation from the republic’s leaders and military commanders, he assembles an apparently damning dossier. The statements seem to speak for themselves:

* “Let no one speak to us of humanity towards these ferocious Vendeans. They will all be exterminated” (Jean-Baptiste Carrier).

* “Following the orders you gave me, I have crushed children beneath horses’ hooves, and massacred women who, at least, will give birth to no more brigands. I have not a single prisoner with which to reproach myself” (Gen. Francois-Joseph Westermann).

* “With mines, fumigations, or other means, we could destroy, put to sleep, asphyxiate the enemy army” (Gen. Antoine Joseph Santerre).

* “General Amey has the ovens lit, and when they are hot enough, he throws the women and children into them” (police official Gannet).

* “In Meudon, they are tanning human skin. Men’s skin has a consistency and quality superior to chamois. That from feminine subjects is more supple, but has less strength” (Louis Saint-Just).

Secher concludes the book by using demographic evidence to determine the death toll in the Vendee, arriving at a staggering minimum of 117,257 -- far more than perished under the guillotine in Paris during the Reign of Terror and close to 15% of the region’s population.

This sinister evidence, with its hints of poison gas and crematoria, indeed seems to cast the Vendee as a forerunner of the Holocaust and has ensured that Secher’s book has had an effect well beyond the French right wing. During the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, the Vendee received far more agonized attention from mainstream historians and politicians than it had during earlier anniversaries. On this side of the Atlantic, the acclaimed historian Simon Schama drew heavily on Secher in his influential book “Citizens,” which cast a deeply caustic eye on the French Revolution’s bloody excesses.

Yet it has become clear, after long, vituperative debates in French academia, that Secher’s book is deceptive in its methods and irresponsible in its conclusions. Secher is not guilty of fabricating evidence or of plagiarism, the offenses for which several prominent American historians have recently fallen into disgrace. But the sad fact is that historians do not need to flout the formal rules of attribution and evidence-collecting to do serious damage to the public understanding of their subjects.

Over the last 20 years, two scholars have had an arguably disastrous effect on the understanding of an immensely important subject -- the Holocaust -- by writing books that handled sources acceptably but that made sensational and misleading assertions. First came the German historian Ernst Nolte, who suggested in the 1980s that Nazi crimes came largely as responses to Soviet examples, placing a large share of the blame on Stalin. He was followed by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an American who imputed collective guilt for the Holocaust first to the entire German nation and, more recently, to Christianity in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Secher shares these scholars’ habits of distortion and oversimplification.

Make no mistake: The scourging of the Vendee was a hideous crime. But was it genocide? Secher puts the word in his title and then, incredibly, does not use it again until the last 10 pages of the book. He never justifies comparing the Vendee to the exponentially bloodier killing fields of the 20th century. For most historians, “genocide” implies an attempt to define a group as a race and to exterminate it as a race, regardless of the individual politics of its members. Yet despite some wild French revolutionary rhetoric containing references to a Vendean “race,” and despite a few scattered accounts of killing of pro-revolutionary Vendeans, there is no evidence that the troops proceeded systematically in this manner.

Despite the talk of poison gas, no such weapon was ever used in the Vendee. The use of ovens and the tanning of human skin, hideous as they were, appear to have been isolated incidents. It is also worth remarking that the Parisian authorities suspected Westermann, the officer who boasted of killing children, of undue “moderation,” thereby giving him every reason to exaggerate his bloody excesses (to no avail -- he went to the guillotine, with the revolutionary Danton, a few months later).

As for the death toll, it is horrible -- but it represents deaths from all causes, including disease, armed soldiers killed in combat and the massacres of pro-revolutionary Vendeans by the rebels. By lumping together large-scale killings with terrible but isolated atrocities Secher has produced a warped and misleading version of events.

There are many legitimate historical frameworks for understanding what happened. We can see the slaughter in the Vendee, with Schama, as an emanation of the Reign of Terror. We can see it as one in a long series of hideous European civil and religious conflicts. A particularly apt comparison would be to the blood-drenched Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, in which more than a quarter of the population perished throughout a large area of Germany and which witnessed atrocities every bit as ghastly as the ones documented by Secher.

Alternately, we can see the Vendee as the most horrifying opening episode in a 23-year European conflagration, which would see French armies conquer most of the European continent and repress uprisings from Lisbon to Moscow with much the same ferocity they had displayed in the Vendee. Historians can debate such ideas with profit. But the introduction of “genocide” into discussions of the Vendee does nothing but harm.

Following the controversies over “A French Genocide,” Secher published a history of the French province of Brittany in comic-book form. One might say he had finally found a medium appropriate to his sense of subtlety and historical nuance. It is a pity that his earlier, cartoonish version of the French Revolution has now been given to an English-speaking audience, while many far more worthy European history books remain untranslated.