Was France among the most genocidal regimes in the 1900s?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Historically "in the know" lists of major genocidal regimes from the 20th Century usually at least include Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Often staples like 1994 Rwanda or the Khmer Rouge are added to the mix. In recent years, recognition of the Congo Free State holocaust has spread widely. "Anti-American" or what-have-you dissident/leftist/etc. kinds of writers have often made reference to multitudes of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the US over the last century or so, campaigns of violence and cruelty involving millions of cumulative deaths.

There appears to be much scattered, but actually quite solid, evidence that supposedly decrepit little France ought to be grouped with other high-level mass-murdering governments like the Japanese Empire, say. Possibly a million civilians in Vietnam and Algeria were slain by the French wars in those nations in the mid-20th Century, often because of massacres, unhealthy living conditions, and bombings inflicted on civilians by France. Other repressive campaigns killed myriads of others, e.g. the Setif massacre (also in Algeria). But the best indicator of a huge atrocity system created by France is in population losses in some of their African colonies (and, to a lesser extent, non-population collapsing but still very deadly forced labor regimes in French Asian colonies). Some journalist or something or other, an Andre Gide or so, went to one region and appears to have clocked a population implosion from 15,000,000 to 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 (IIRC). Another book I found parts of available on Google Books cited about a ten million population decrease in the same area. Even if this was not all the result of Congo Free State-style forced labor, much of it had to have been, and in conjunction with the scale of other French imperial atrocities, points to an upper-end order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 people murdered by the French Empire in the early to middle 20th Century. On the much lower end, we would have something like vague millions, so let's say 2,000,000. Split the difference or whatever and it becomes plausible to accuse some of the numbered French republics of a combined genocide/mass murder on the scale of 6,000,000, which is parallel to, though more disparate and not itself part of an even vaster slaughter than, the Nazi genocide of Jews.

Also, more recently, in connection with that well-known Rwandan holocaust, I read a scholarly treatise on it one time (maybe by Samantha Powers? I don't remember right now) that said France had actually militarily aided one of the main parts of the Rwandan government that was actually administering much/most of the genocide. Not that the French forces directly killed civilians, but that they defended the genocidaires indirectly by military backing of the regime they were integrated into.