Robert Paxton

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Robert Paxton (b 1932) is an American historian specializing in Vichy France and Europe during the World War II era. Paxton is best known for his 1972 book "Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944," in which he argued that Vichy collaboration with Germany was a voluntary program entered into by the Vichy government, not forced upon it by German pressure. This book is considered one of the keystone works on France during the World War II era. He was called in for the trial of Maurice Papon (1910-2007), who was convicted for crimes against humanity in 1998.

Additionally, Paxton has put forward a respected definition of fascism: "Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." [1]

Paxton was born in Lexington, Virginia and educated at Washington and Lee University before earning his M.A. at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University. Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley and State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in New York, where he is now emeritus professor of history.

[edit] Bibliography

• Robert O. Paxton, “Parades and politics at Vichy,” 1966.
• Robert O. Paxton, “Vichy France, Old Guard and new Order, 1940-1944,” 1972.
• Robert O. Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews, 1981.
• Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism”

[edit] See also

• Maurice Rajsfus, historian of French police