officials and National Guard members, broadened the anti-revolutionary coalition and brought the young men into action. With , Reynald Secher's thesis for the began with a generalization of the standard arguments to the whole region. Although La Chapelle-Basse-Mer served him repeatedly as a reference point, Secher illustrated his arguments with wide citations from national and regional archives to establish a broader frame of reference. Furthermore, he drew on graphic, nineteenth century accounts widely known to the historians of the Vendee: Carrier drownings and the "infernal columns of Turreau". Most importantly, however, Secher broke with conventional assessments by asserting on the basis of minimal evidence, Tilly claims, that the pre-revolutionary Vendée was more prosperous than the rest of France (to better emphasize the devastation of the war and the repression). He used dubious statistical methods to establish population losses and fatalities, statistical processes that inflated the number of people in the region, the number and value of houses, and the financial losses of the region. Secher's statistical procedure relied on three unjustifiable assumptions. First, Secher assumes a constant birth rate of about 37 per thousand of population, when actually, Tilly maintains, the population was declining. Second, Secher assumes no net migration; Tilly maintains that thousands fled the region, or at least shifted where they lived within the region. Finally, Secher understated the population present at the end of the conflict by ending it 1802, not 1794. Despite the criticism, a number of scholars continue the assertion of genocide. In addition to Secher and Chaunu, Kurt Jonassohn and Frank Chalk also consider it a case of genocide. Further support comes from Adam Jones, who wrote in Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction a summary of the Vendée uprising, supporting the view that it was a genocide: "the Vendée Uprising stands as a notable example of a mass killing campaign that has only recently been conceptualized as 'genocide and that while this designation "is not universally shared ... it seems apt in the light of the large scale murder of a designated group (the Vendéan civilian population)." Pierre Chaunu describes it as the first "ideological genocide". Mark Levene, a historian who specializes in the study of genocide, considers the Vendée "an archetype of modern genocide". Other scholars who consider the massacres to be genocide include R. J. Rummel, Jean Tulard, and Anthony James Joes. In 2020, David Bell published a paper in Journal of Genocide