Vichy France: Old Guard New Order, 1940-1944

"Paxton was born in 1932 so was a comparatively young man when he wrote this book (there was a time when I thought 40 wasn’t young, but now I think it is). It’s an extraordinary book, a book that becomes part of French history, in the impact it had on public discussion in France. It pushes the idea that Vichy was not simply a puppet of the Germans, but rather an autonomous government, doing things partly in parallel with German actions, but which it’s not required to do. Paxton is particularly interested in the fate of the Jews and later wrote much more extensively about that. He says there’s a specific Vichy anti-Semitism, a specific Vichy initiative in what’s done to the Jews. He is taking down Vichy in lots ways. He’s also saying that Vichy is important and very central to French life. He’s attacking some people who are still figures in French public life in 1972. It’s also an interesting book in retrospect. Paxton, in lots of ways, was a very unfashionable kind of historian in the early 70s. I’ve talked about Weber and Zeldin, about books that are intellectually avant garde, social history rather than political history, books tackling these huge, big themes. The thing about Vichy France is that, although it’s a book with huge implications, in lots of ways it’s a very focused political work of history. He used a lot of diplomatic archives. He was initially a military historian and wrote his first book about the French military at Vichy. I remember once meeting someone who had known Paxton in the late 1960s, when he was at Berkeley in California. He said you just can’t imagine how unfashionable Paxton was at Berkeley in the late 60s, this bloke in a suit, working on the French army, at a time when everybody was spending their spare time dropping acid, writing books about big sweeping themes in social history. It’s a striking example of a book that can seem rather narrow but then has these explosive implications. Paxton has this narrow political narrative but it’s beautifully done, very well written. It’s pretty straightforward and then occasionally he livens things up with a hand grenade. There are these sweeping generalizations like ‘ the French Resistance was probably only about 2% of the French population.’ This is completely separate from his main argument. He’s got very little evidence for it but, at the same time, it makes it a more provocative, exciting book. 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, if you do move beyond Paxton. Having reacted against him very strongly when he first published, people have almost tilted the other way and turned him into this great icon of academic respectability. But even when people do turn against Paxton, they’ll still say this is a wonderful book, a classic example of how you might do a certain kind of history."