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17 to 30% of the Cambodian population died during Pol-Pot’s regime. The scope of this massacre only seems to be able to be explained by a process of total war, within and without (civil war and conflict between the USA and Vietnam). How can such violence be accounted for? Can it be explained as a circumstantial reaction to the American war in Cambodia? Is the basis cultural and ethnological, stemming from a warrior or religious tradition? The hypothesis of a more political and ideological explanation seems the most attractive: the author refuses here to adopt the point of view of an "essentialism" of communism as intrinsic and absolute evil and prefers to focus on the implacable Cambodian singularity. The regime constantly had to fight against its initial weakness (few activists in the country, not much money or equipment, political and material dependence on Vietnam), and its late arrival at a period and in a world and a region in which capitalism seemed to be winning. Its desperate pursuit and its radical violence can perhaps be explained by this original weakness.