By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 October 2026

Gilles Veinstein was a leading historian of the Ottoman Empire, the director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) from 1986 and the Holder of the chair of Turkish and Ottoman History at the Collège de France from 1999. He held both posts until his death in 2013. In April 1995, amid the controversy in France over the attempt to prosecute Bernard Lewis for refusing to agree that the 1915-16 Armenian massacres were the same as the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry, Veinstein wrote an article for L’Histoire, ‘Trois Questions sur un Massacre’, reviewing the evidence for the claim that what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War resulted from a deliberate genocidal plan by the Ottoman government. A translation of the article is given below.