History undergrad here, I'm doing a project which includes creating an educational poster on a genocide of my choice. The time period of the module typically ranges from the Armenian Genocide until modern day but after reading "The perfect heresy" I've decided that I wanted to go a little outside the box and do a piece on the Cathars and the persecution they faced by the Catholic Church, also a bit of a Francophile so the topic interests me quite a bit more than the other genocides, even if it isn't as well documented.
As an additional question, are there any books that I can use as source material which address this view point?
Thanks in advance guys.
From a historian's point of view, 'The Perfect Heresy' by Sean O'Shea is considered popular history - and I can see how from that book's spin one could get the idea that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide. But the Crusade really doesn't meet even the loosest definition of the term; it was a war of Christians on other Christians under the claim of 'heresy'. Certainly heresy was persecuted at a mass scale (whether heresy actually existed independent of the Catholic Church's view of what constituted orthodox Christianity in the 13th c is another matter) but I would suggest it was closer to a Red Scare than a Holocaust.
If you want to pursue this line though, as university-level scholarship goes, O'Shea's book should really be avoided. My AH wiki page has a number of posts on the subject of the 'Cathars' which might give you counter-point for your ideas, and it includes some reading recommendations. This weekend I wrote extensively about the origins of the medieval inquisition which you might find interesting. In terms of the most recent scholarship, you should have a look at R.I. Moore's The War On Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe and Mark Gregory Pegg's A Most Holy War : The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Pegg's book should be interesting to you because he does pursue some questions of cultural difference in the South, mostly in the context of how inquisitor's interpreted heretical activity, but there's no argument even on that foundation for genocide.