L'Armée de Vichy. Le corps des officiers français (Contemporaine)

by Robert O. Paxton, Pierre de Longuemar (Translator)

22 juin 1940 : l'armistice de Rethondes sanctionne la défaite écrasante de la France face à l'Allemagne hitlérienne. Mais l'armée française subsiste sous une forme provisoire et limitée : l'Armée de l'armistice. Pièce maîtresse du régime de Vichy, elle se veut l'incarnation des valeurs autoritaires et patriotiques de la Révolution nationale et se voue à la création d'une « France nouvelle », à travers l'encadrement et la formation de la jeunesse. La majorité des officiers adhère aux objectifs de l'Etat français tandis qu'une minorité, tout en restant généralement fidèle à Pétain, prépare des moyens clandestins de mobilisation, puis rejoint la Résistance. L’historien américain Robert O. Paxton s'attache à restituer les motivations complexes des officiers français entre 1940 et 1944 et les conséquences, souvent dramatiques, de leurs actes. Complément essentiel de La France de Vichy (du même Paxton), cet essai est d'une lecture cruciale pour qui veut comprendre les années d'occupation et l'histoire de l'armée française.

Genres: France, History, World War II

555 pages, Kindle Edition

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.