Robert Paxton | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Owen Paxton (1932-06-15)June 15, 1932 (age 92) Lexington, Virginia, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Known for | Political scientist andhistorian |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Columbia University |
| Notable students | Sharon Traweek |
Robert Owen Paxton (born June 15, 1932) is an Americanpolitical scientist and historian specializing inVichy France,fascism, and Europe during theWorld War II era. He is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History atColumbia University. He is best known for his 1972 bookVichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which precipitated intense debate in France, and led to a paradigm shift in how the events of theVichy regime are interpreted.
Paxton was born on June 15, 1932, inLexington, Virginia.[1] He attendedPhillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for his secondary education.[2] After Exeter, he received a B.A. fromWashington and Lee University in 1954. Later, he won aRhodes Scholarship and spent two years earning an M.A. atMerton College, Oxford,[3] where he studied under historians includingJames Joll andJohn Roberts. He earned a Ph.D. fromHarvard University in 1963.[4]
Paxton taught at theUniversity of California, Berkeley[3] and theState University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty ofColumbia University in 1969. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997. He remains aprofessor emeritus. He has contributed more than twenty reviews toThe New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017.[5]
Paxton is best known for his 1972 bookVichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. In opposition to the traditional view pioneered byRobert Aron, he argued that theVichy government was eager to collaborate withNazi Germany and did not practice "passive resistance" to German rule.[6] Unlike Aron andHenri Michel, Paxton did not play down Vichy's achievements in his explanation of its domestic agenda. He argued that the reforms undertaken by the Vichy government prefigured the reforms of the 1950s and 1960s and derived from Vichy's aim to transform French society.[6]
Upon the book's publication in French translation in 1973, Paxton became the subject of intense vitriol fromFrench historians and commentators. During a televised debate with Paxton in 1976, the Vichy naval leaderGabriel Auphan called him a liar. However, the translation sold thousands of copies, particularly to the young generation shaped by thecivil unrest of May 1968 and who were uninterested in the "cozy mythologies" of Vichy apologists.[4]
For decades prior to the 1970s modern period, French historiography was dominated by conservative or pro-Communist thinking, neither of them very inclined to consider the grass-roots pro-democracy developments at liberation.[7]
There was little recognition in French scholarship on the active participation of the Vichy regime in the deportation of French Jews, until Paxton's 1972 book appeared. The book received a French translation within a year and sold thousands of copies in France. In the words of French historianGérard Noiriel, the book "had the effect of a bombshell, because it showed, with supporting evidence, that the French state had participated in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi concentration camps, a fact that had been concealed by historians until then."[8]
The "Paxtonian revolution", as the French called it, had a profound effect on French historiography. In 1997, Paxton was called as an expert witness to testify about collaboration during the Vichy period, at the trial in France ofMaurice Papon.[9]
Marc Ferro, a French historian, wrote thatVichy France would make the left feel uneasy by its contradiction of their belief that only the élite had betrayed France in 1940, "whereas in reality heroic resistance to the last man from Bayonne to Africa made no sense for anyone".[6] He also noted that theGaullists would object to Paxton's portrayal of them as "heirs of the regime they fought against" and that it would disturb all those who believed that Pétain had played a "double game" between the Axis and the Allies.[6] Communists welcomed the book for buttressing their belief that Vichy had been the product of state monopoly capitalism, and it was also applauded by Jewish groups.[10] The reaction among Resistance groups was mixed due to Paxton's argument that there was no serious Resistance until well into 1941.[11]
In the preface to the 1982 edition ofVichy France, Paxton disagreed with the assertion of his opponents that he had written in "easy moral superiority" from the perspective of a "victor": "In fact [it] was written in the shadow of thewar in Vietnam, which sharpened my animosity against nationalist conformism of all kinds. Writing in the late 1960s, what concerned me was not the comparison with defeated France but the confident swagger of the Germans in the summer of 1940."[12]
Today, the book is considered a historical classic and one of the best studies on France in the Vichy era.[4] It is so influential thatRichard Vinen said that his
interpretation is completely orthodox, perhaps excessively orthodox, in France. In a funny way,Eric Zemmour's right to say that Paxton has become a pillar of the French establishment ... Historians will one day move beyond Paxton. In some ways, it's been hard for French people to do that because it seems as if you're making an apology for the Vichy government ... But even when people do turn against Paxton, they'll still say that this is a wonderful book, a classic example of how you might do a certain kind of history.[13]
It was published at a time when French historians and filmmakers were also exploring history under the Vichy regime, as inMarcel Ophüls' influential two-part documentaryThe Sorrow and the Pity (1969).
In 1981, Paxton and historian Michael R. Marrus co-published the book,Vichy France and the Jews, which examined theVichy regime's policy towards the Jews during World War II.[14]The New York Times review of the book was written byStanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor and scholar on France.[15]
As an expert on the Vichy era, Paxton co-wroteClaude Chabrol's 1993 documentaryThe Eye of Vichy. In 1997 he testified at the trial of Vichy bureaucratMaurice Papon.[16]
Paxton has focused his work on exploringmodels and definition of fascism.
In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely byits ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine likecommunism orsocialism. Instead, he focuses on fascism's political context and functional development. The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that onlyNazi Germany andFascist Italy progressed through all five:
In his 2004 bookThe Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton refines his five-stage model and puts forward the following definition for fascism:
Fascism may be defined as a form ofpolitical behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline,humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatorycults of unity, energy, andpurity, in which a mass-based party of committednationalistmilitants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandonsdemocraticliberties and pursues with redemptiveviolence and withoutethical orlegal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.[18]
In 2021, Paxton wrote an op-ed forNewsweek in which he stated that he now believedDonald Trump was a fascist, after insisting for several years that he was instead a right-wing populist. Trump's incitement of the2021 storming of the United States Capitol was the deciding factor in him changing his view.[19]
In 2009, the French government awarded Paxton theLégion d'honneur, the highest French order of merit.[20]
Paxton is an avidbirdwatcher and a former president of theLinnaean Society of New York.[5]
[Le livre] fit l'effet d'une bombe, car il montrait, preuves à l'appui, que l'État français avait participé à la déportation des Juifs dans les camps de concentration nazis, ce qui avait été occulté par les historiens jusque-là.
