FOREWORD

ARMENIA 1915 - Paris Exhibition Poster

This virtual exhibition extends and perpetuates the Armenia 1915 exhibition initiated by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo and presented at the Paris City Hall on the occasion of the commemoration of the centenary of the genocide of the Armenians.

The exhibition was programmed from April 29 to July 4, 2015 and attracted over 50,000 visitors. Designed and curated by Raymond Kevorkian, it was made possible with the participation of the AGBU Nubar Library, which provided part of its collections and contributed to the conception of the exhibition. The Yerevan Genocide Museum-Institute was also one of the partner institutions.

Armenia 1915 is the largest exhibition about the genocide of the Armenians, ever made possible in Europe with more than 500 photos, documents and various pieces. Hereafter we trimmed the main thematic entries, with a completely reedited text.

The virtual exhibition first evokes the everyday structures of the Ottoman Armenian society at the end of the 19^th century. It shows the ideological radicalization of the Unionist leaders in power, between 1908 and 1914, which led to the genocide. It then presents the implementation of the genocide with its major phases in 1915 and 1916, before taking a human and political assessment of it at the end of World War I. A final section is dedicated to the reactions aroused in France by the fate of the Armenians.

I was overcome with anxiety when I received these telegrams concerning the Armenians. I could not sleep at night. The heart could not remain indifferent to this. But if it had not been us, it would have been them. Naturally, we were the ones who started this. It was a question of life or death for our nation.

Memoirs of Halil Menteşe, Ottoman Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Eminent members of the Young Turk Committee in 1908Beginning on April 24, 1915, the nature and scope of the genocide to come was made clear by the arrest of Armenian political and intellectual elites in Constantinople and in major provincial cities by order of the government led by the Committee of Union and Progress. As repeatedly seen in the twentieth century, this exterminating violence by a state against a portion of its population is set into motion in the context of war.

The rise to power of the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terraki), or the CUP, in July 1908 generated immense hope among people persecuted under the former autocratic regime of the Sultan. But it also promoted the quest for a new political model: an ethnically homogeneous nation-state. For Unionist leaders, this was the only option for regenerating a weakened Ottoman Empire. However, such a project implied the exclusion of groups considered impossible to assimilate or whose existence was perceived as an obstacle to the unification of the empire and its inhabitants.

After successive territorial losses in the late 19^th century, the humiliating defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) shifted the balance within the Unionist Central Committee in favor of its most radical members. Boycott campaigns encouraged by the authorities against Greek and Armenian-owned businesses contributed to instilling among the Muslim population the image of the Greek and Armenian “traitor.” This process of stigmatization—feeding off the legacy of the old Ottoman regime, including massacres that had already afflicted the Armenians between 1894 and 1896—had undoubtedly prepared minds for genocide to be seen as a legitimate “punishment” inflicted on the Greeks, Syriacs and Armenians.