Parades and Politics at Vichy

by Robert O. Paxton

In June 1940 the French Army that Europe had known and feared since Louis XIV vanished in the most overwhelming defeat ever suffered by the military force of a modern nation. This is the story of what really happened to that army.



Originally published in 1966.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: France, History, World War II

484 pages, Hardcover

First published July 21, 1966

About the author

Robert Owen Paxton is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era. After attending secondary school in New England, he received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years earning an M.A. at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963. Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1969. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997. He remains a professor emeritus. He has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017.

Reviews

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a before and an after Paxton. At the end of WWII, french people decided to live in a fiction : everybody was resistant. The reasons are essentially politics, from WWII to cold war, it was a necessity to preserve unity when 30 % french people voted communist.

And Paxton explain: all Superior officers of Liberation Army sweared allegiance to Vichy. That was due to the image of Pétain and his role during Verdun's battle. It had dimensioned Freudian in this paternal refuge in an old man. French people was so disorientated after this unthinkable defeat.

It was an umbearable truth, a psychodram like french people enjoy it. So everybody was Nazi and everybody is guilty.

In reality the truth is more complexe. It's necessairy to read Paxton to understand that war is also a human affair, pathos has a rôle.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understood history differently after my course study with the Professor at Columbia.