Ukraine, Genocide, and the French Revolution

Yale’s Timothy Snyder recently gave a lecture at Boston University arguing that Vladmir Putin and the Russian Federation are committing genocide in Ukraine. The lecture troubled me, not least because Snyder’s use of the word genocide, while deriving from excellent intentions, reminded me uncomfortably of the way the word has crept into discussions of the French Revolution over the past few decades.

I sympathize entirely with Snyder’s broader condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. And I admire Snyder himself as one of the most prominent, passionate, well-informed, and eloquent critics of Russian aggression—for many years now. His prolific essays and speeches can be moralizing, occasionally even hectoring, but a moralizing, hectoring tone is sometimes necessary to fix the world’s attention on evil.

But is the charge of genocide historically and legally correct? And is it useful? Snyder noted that he was citing the definition first composed by Raphael Lemkin and codified by the 1948 “Genocide Convention” of the United Nations. The key phrase he came back to numerous times in the lecture, and in the following discussion, was that genocide consists of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” To prove this intent, he quoted declarations by Vladmir Putin, Russian propaganda, and remarks made by Russian soldiers in the field expressing a desire to exterminate the Ukrainian people, and he linked these remarks to the war crimes actually committed by Russian forces.

During the question period, Snyder was pointedly asked what war could not be cast as a genocide in this manner. He replied that genocide is in fact much more common than people usually think, but that not all wars have been genocidal. He did not cite specifics, but he was admittedly pressed for time.

The first problem I have with Snyder’s argument is that desire and intent are not the same thing. There have been very few wars in which combatants—and leading political figures—have not expressed a desire to exterminate the enemy. But in American law, at least, criminal intent is usually defined not only as acting purposely, with the aim of causing a particular result, but also acting knowingly—i.e. being aware that the criminal conduct in question could have realistically caused that result. It is clear that in the Holocaust, the Nazis acted knowingly, since their actions, if continued unchecked, would beyond doubt have led to the extermination of the Jews and Roma in Europe. But despite the threats to exterminate the Ukrainians which Snyder quoted, Russians today know perfectly well that they do not have the capacity to exterminate the Ukrainian people. They have the capacity to commit massacres and other war crimes on a horrific scale. But if doing this is genocide, then a very high proportion of wars throughout history have also been genocides, at which point the concept—as Snyder’s questioner implied—comes perilously close to losing its meaning.

It is this “defining down” of genocide which reminds me uncomfortably of the French Revolutionary debates. Back in 1986, a young French historian named Reynald Secher published a book called Le génocide franco-français: La Vendée-Vengé. In it, he charged that the forces of the revolutionary First French Republic committed genocide in the region known as the Vendée, in which a large-scale Catholic, royalist rebellion had taken place against the Republic in 1793. The book did not bring many significant new facts to life. It had always been known that revolutionary politicians called for the Vendée’s “extermination,” and that the republican forces committed many massacres and atrocities, killing thousands of innocent people. Secher came up with the absurdly precise figure of 117,257 deaths and added documentary evidence. But the book attracted attention because of the inflammatory title, and an inflammatory preface by the prominent historian Pierre Chaunu which compared the revolutionary forces to the Nazi SS and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge.

I won’t go into detail here about why the charge of genocide is misplaced in the case of the Vendée. I discussed the issue at length three years ago in an article for The Journal of Genocide Studies. In it, I drew heavily on the work of the premier French historian of the Vendée, Jean-Clément Martin, who has also argued against the label of genocide (here, for instance, in an English-language interview). Essentially, the revolutionary forces never had the intent of targeting any specific demographic group. They spared inhabitants of the Vendée who had sided with the Republic against the rebels, or who had left the region during the conflict. Needless to say, this distinction hardly exonerates the revolutionaries, who committed terrible atrocities and war crimes. It is shameful that the name of Louis-Marie Turreau, the revolutionary commander responsible for the worst atrocities, remains proudly carved on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, thanks to his later services to Napoleon Bonaparte’s First Empire. But distinctions matter in the use of history. Not every atrocious historical actor is Hitler. Not every negotiation with such actors is Munich (as I argued here a few years ago). Not every atrocity is genocide.

It's also crucial to note the political purpose which lay behind Secher’s work. It was evident in the title itself, which referenced the phrase “la guerre franco-française,” first coined in a 1950 book by Louis-Dominique Girard and which generally refers to Vichy France. It is absolutely no coincidence that Secher wrote his book in the years that France was finally coming to terms with the willing role that a French government and French officials played in the Holocaust. Put bluntly, for the French far right, calling the repression of the Vendée a genocide served to distract attention from the collaboration of their own ideological ancestors in the real genocide that took place during World War II. It also provided a sort of counter-indictment against the ideological ancestors of the people who had, both literally and figuratively, put Vichy France in the dock after the war.

Despite the weakness of his case, and his apparent ulterior motives, Secher’s work has had a disturbingly wide influence. In any good Parisian bookstore today, the section on the history of the French Revolution will contain half a dozen titles or more by Secher and others that take the charge of genocide as proven. Talk to well-educated far-right French voters about the French Revolution and the word ‘genocide” will very likely be spoken. Secher’s original book has even appeared in English translation, thanks to the University Press of Notre Dame. In 2019, a journalist writing for the influential conservative website Quillette published a thinly researched article entitled “The French Genocide That Has Been Air-Brushed From History.” And as I found out in the course of researching my own 2019 article, in the United States, right-wing Catholic websites now distribute videos and other material in English about the Vendée “genocide” as well. Interestingly, they do not claim, as Secher did, that the victims were targeted because they were inhabitants of the rebel region. In the American version, the victims were targeted because they were Catholic.

Let me be clear. There are huge differences between Reynald Secher, who made a charge of genocide with apparent, disturbing ulterior motives, and Timothy Snyder, who is making one out of heartfelt, understandable, and in most ways very admirable motives. But I still don’t think that Snyder is justified in making the charge, and not just because it is, as I argued above, incorrect.

Genocide is the ultimate crime, and, as such, it calls for the most extraordinary possible means to stop it. How much concern should we have for our own national interest if the possibility of genocide looms? What risks should we not take, what sacrifices should we not make, to bring it to a halt? The very word can shut down discussion. The very idea of coming to terms with perpetrators of genocide, of doing anything other than striving to defeat them utterly and put them on trial, seems indecent. This rhetorical force, of course, is precisely what makes the term so attractive to those who deploy it—including on the French far right.

The case for providing large-scale aid to Ukraine, which Timothy Snyder puts with such formidable eloquence and passion, is overwhelming. But the geopolitical situation created by Putin’s invasion remains enormously dangerous, and we cannot only take into consideration the threat to the Ukrainians themselves when considering how to act. The war potentially threatens much more. The charge of genocide, however tempting it is to make, blinds us to this fact.