Events & Programs

Acclaimed American historian Robert Paxton presents In search of Vichy France: An American scholar's odyssey.

About Robert Paxton

Born at Lexington, Virginia, in 1932, Robert O. Paxton received a B. A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954, an MA from Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar) in 1956, and a doctorate from Harvard in 1963.

Paxton devoted much of his scholarly career to studying the Vichy régime of Marshal Philippe Pétain (1940-1944). The French archives were still closed when he began work in 1960, but he was able to draw from interviews with former Vichy officials and from German and American archives a view of the Vichy Regime quite different from what was generally believed in France at this time.

Whereas Robert Aron had argued in what was then the standard book (Histoire de Vichy, 1957) that Germany applied overwhelming pressure to occupied France while Vichy attempted to lessen the damage. Paxton discovered Vichy initiatives in the documents of the period. Profiting from some leeway, at least at the beginning, Vichy pursued vigorously two autonomous policies: voluntary participation in Hitler’s Europe, in hopes of eased armistice conditions and peace terms ; and, the "National Revolution," a program to replace the discredited Third Republic with an authoritarian state. The overwhelming Nazi pressures came only later when Germany struggled with the disastrous Russian campaign.

These findings, vigorously contested when Paxton’s second book, Vichy France, was translated into French in 1973, have been largely corroborated since the 1980s as the French archives have opened and a new génération of French historians have studied them.

Paxton retired as from Columbia University as professor emeritus of history in 1997. He is the author of five books, most recently The Anatomy of Fascism, written with Michael Marrus.

Read a review of the The Anatomy of Fascism from the New York Times.