If you are interested in the French officer corps, Girardet said to me, you should study their reactions to the German occupation of 1940-1944, for that was a time of deep uncertainty and division, with major implications for the Liberation of France and for its postwar politics.įrench career officers disagreed in 1940-1942 about who was their legitimate leader. I returned for advice to Professor Raoul Girardet, the expert on French military matters at Sciences Po. When I arrived at the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre at the chateau of Vincennes, however, I was informed that there were no archives concerning Saint-Cyr since everything had been destroyed in an American bombing raid in 1944. I went to Paris in September 1960 expecting to carry out research for a doctoral dissertation on the history of the French military academy at Saint-Cyr, the French West Point. I came by accident to the topic of the French officer corps during the German occupation (1940-1944). Stuart Hughes and Stanley Hoffmann on your work?

What brought you to this topic? Could you discuss the influence of Harvard scholars H. Your first book, Parades and Politics at Vichy: The French Officer Corps under Marshal Pétain (1966), grew out of your doctoral dissertation at Harvard. Jason Dawsey conducted the following email interview with Paxton in November 2021. The Institute for the Study of War and Democracy is grateful for the opportunity to interview Robert O. He also served in 2009 as guest curator for “Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation,” an exhibition held at the New York Public Library. These texts continue to educate readers around the world, inside and outside the academy. (with Michael Marrus) Vichy France and the Jews (Basic Books, 1981 Stanford University Press, 2019)įrench Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgères’ Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1997) Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (Knopf, 1972)Įurope in the Twentieth Century (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) Parades and Politics at Vichy: The French Officer Corps under Marshal Pétain (Princeton University Press, 1966)

His pathbreaking books on Vichy France, the emergence of fascism, and the Holocaust in France include: In 1969 Paxton embarked on a long, productive tenure at Columbia University, where he is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Modern Europe.

As a professor of history, Paxton (PhD, Harvard University, 1963) taught at the University of California-Berkeley and State University of New York-Stony Brook. Paxton have profoundly reshaped our understanding of central issues in twentieth-century European and world history.

The anatomy of fascism robert paxton