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For the use of the word purge in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Purge

In history and political science, to purge is to remove people considered by the group in power to be "undesirable" from a government, political party, a profession, or from community or society as a whole, often by violent means. Restoration of people from a purge is known as rehabilitation.

In the Bible, God requites all people to purge themselves of impurities. In the Old Testament this often meant through ritual cleansing. In our New Testament time, however, we are cleansed of sin through the shed blood of Jesus alone. God first requires repentance, or turning away from impurity. We are to purge ourselves and be holy, as He is holy.

The purge has been a political tool throughout recorded history.

In the era of Republican Rome, Marius proscribed Sullan supporters after he and Cinna ousted Cnaeus Octavius; Sulla followed with even more brutal proscriptions against Marian supporters when he came into the dictatorship. The Second Triumvirate instituted more proscriptions some forty years afterward after taking control of Rome from Caesar's murderers.

The earliest use of the term itself was the English Civil War's Pride's Purge. In 1648, the moderate members of the English Long Parliament were purged by the army. Parliament would suffer subsequent purges under the Commonwealth including the purge of the entire House of Lords. Counter-revolutionaries such as royalists were purged as well as more radical revolutionaries such as the Levellers. After the Restoration, obstinate republicans were purged while some fled to New England.

The French Revolution saw revolutionary factions purging each other. The most famous purge was Robespierre's Terror which ended with him being purged as well. After the fall of Napoleon, all those associated with revolutionary activity were purged.

Purges are often associated with the Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Those who were purged (among them artists, scientists, teachers, people in the military, but also many long-time communists who dared to disagree with the party leadership) were sent to labor camps or executed. The most notorious purge was the Great Purge initiated by Joseph Stalin during the 1930s. Deng Xiaoping was known for the distinction of returning to power multiple times after surviving multiple purges.

The Nazis also engaged in purges, most notably in the Night of the Long Knives (1934) and the mass reprisals against Adolf Hitler's opponents following the July Plot (1944).

After France's liberation by the Allies in 1944, purges were processed by the Free French and mostly the French Resistance against former collaborationnists, the so called vichystes.

The United States has never been a position where "purges" were called for^{[citation needed]}, but one could argue the events that took place in McCarthyism (1950s) were anti-communist purges, or anti-fascist purges in the preceding two decades.

• CPSU purges
• political repression