Cilicia Campaign is of bad memory for French Army and for the History of Franco-Turkish relationship. This site evokes some aspects of this painful birth of modern Turkey, in the context of the period, for a better comprehension between Turk, French and Armenian people.



The duty of memory should not apply only to the massacres and genocides. It must also apply to illuminate these painful periods and keep the memory of which, though trivial, has made them possible.



That is why I want to describe the context of the time. From documents found in the family, we can better understand how our grandparents were educated at school before 1914, or how was catechism, what were the ideologies through the century, or how the colonization was perceived in our countryside. The family papers are not sufficient to describe the Cilicia Campaign. Other descendants of the soldiers gave me photographs or told me anecdotes. I also found many documents in the Service Historique de la Défense, in the archives of the French Administration of Cilicia.

A trip in Turkey, on August 2006, gave me opportunities to better understand what our soldiers had lived. Finally, I found in the books cited in the bibliography, the history of political and economic relations between France and Turkey: François 1er and Capitulations, the links between trade and politics, the curious way in which Louis XV was acting on the "Question d'Orient".



Only historians can estimate the share of the responsibility of Turkey, the Ottomans or Young Turks, in the emergence of context that has fostered these massacres. And how to judge the work of Mustafa Kemal ... Great historians have tried to understand how Europe and many other countries had responsibilities on what was happening in Turkey at this time.



Today, the memory of these causes will it become the foundation for building a stable peace?



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