Books & ideas

The Era of Victims

David El Kenz — 2025-12-09T07:37:00Z

Since the two World Wars, the victim has been raised to the status of a sacred and predominant figure in historical memory. The victim has become the new figure of the hero, thus setting a new and controversial example.

Naming the Crime

Pauline Peretz — 2019-02-14T06:00:00Z

Two men, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin and the resistant Jan Karski, realized early on what fate the Nazis had decided for Europe's Jews. Why did their struggle for the political and legal recognition of a crime against an entire people encounter so many obstacles?

The Weight of Memory

Éric Méchoulan — 2016-10-13T07:00:00Z

In a multidisciplinary book, Catherine Coquio shows that behind the contemporary cult for memory and truth lies a crisis that is preventing us from moving forward.

The devils from the Thousand Hills

Julien Seroussi — 2016-04-04T07:00:00Z

Although the massacres in Rwanda did not take place in the context of a religious war, religion did play an important role: identifying the Tutsi with the devil caused violence to spread throughout society.

How to Judge the Rwandan Genocide?

Liora Israël — 2014-02-10T08:30:00Z

Whether it is a matter of prosecuting ordinary crimes or genocide, meting out justice is a process that involves the law, legal institutions and individual human interactions. International justice is still in its infancy, and the International Criminal Tribunal set up in Arusha, Tanzania to prosecute those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide is hampered by a number of difficulties. Liora Israël, a sociologist of law, went to Arusha for a first-hand look at some of the complications and paradoxes underlying international justice.

1939-1945: The Germans exterminate the Jews

Ivan Jablonka — 2013-03-21T09:29:13Z

In a text which will be remembered as his masterpiece, historian Saul Friedländer recounts the enactment of the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe”. His book is a monumental piece of historical work, but also a choral narrative which allows the voices of all the witnesses to resonate, and a personal quest for this child who lost his parents in the Shoah.

Rwanda: The Steps to Genocide

Claudine Vidal — 2011-03-16T13:00:57Z

How did it come about that by 7 April 1994 a political faction had decided on and initiated the Tutsi genocide? André Guichaoua's book investigates the Rwandan state's genocide strategy, which was carried out by an extremist government after it had eliminated the legitimate authorities.

The language of the executioners and the language of the victims

Ivan Jablonka — 2010-11-29T07:50:00Z

As Friedländer notes in The Years of Extermination, Hitler lost the war against the Allied forces but not the one he unleashed against the Jews. Within a few years, Nazism had succeeded in destroying a civilisation, a heritage, a language. The executioners spoke German but they also invented a whole propaganda lexicon, complete with coded language and circumlocutions designed to conceal the extermination scheme. Conversely, in the face of imminent destruction, the victims accumulated testimonies. Are there such things as languages of life and languages of death? Dialogue between a historian and his translator.

Remnants of the Holocaust on the Eastern Front

Jean-Marc Dreyfus — 2008-04-22T06:00:00Z

The large-scale massacres of Jews on what was then Soviet Territory are not as well recorded as the industrialised mass murder perpetrated in the extermination camps. Since 1945, several initiatives have sought to bring to light the traces of a pre-war Jewish presence and the accounts of the killings, this more urgently so over recent years. Flash back on the work of those memory rescuers.