Now that the French National Assembly has declared that it is unlawful to deny the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1912, the Assembly should go a step further and declare the massacres in La Vendée of 1793 as genocide as well.

La Vendée was, in fact, the first modern European genocide and the blueprint and prototype, complete with relevant justifications, of the genocides perpetrated by Nazism and Communism in the 20th century. Alexander Solzhenitsyn implicitly recognised this when he made it a point of visiting there after he landed in France shortly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, skipping audiences with French intellectuals.