Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order

by Robert O. Paxton

Book Overview

Robert O. Paxton's classic study of the aftermath of France's sudden collapse under Nazi invasion utilizes captured German archives and other contemporary materials to construct a strong and disturbing account of the Vichy period in France. With a new introduction and updated bibliography, Vichy France demonstrates that the collaborationist government of Marshal P tain did far more than merely react to German pressures. The Vichy leaders actively...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231124694
• ISBN13: 9780231124690
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 438 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Path-breaking

This book was such an important text in its field that I feel it deserves five stars even though I disagree with some of its findings. The French talk of a 'Paxtonian Revolution' to describe the effect this book had on the historiography. Along with Eberhard Jackel's work, Paxton suggested that collaboration was not something which was imposed on the French by the Germans but rather something which the French government actively sought as a means of promoting their own internal political agenda and of finding a privileged place in the Nazi new order. This flew in the face of the work of previous historians who had insisted that collaboration was imposed on an unwilling French government. Paxton's ideas on this have now established themselves as orthodoxy in the field. That historians are still obliged to quote Paxton 40 years on shows what a seminal text this was. The part of the book which failed to stick in the long run is the section which deals with public opinion. He sees public opinion as broadly supporting Vichy and collaboration. No serious analysis of the archives on this question could support such an analysis.

Landmark Work

Robert Paxton is the supreme authority on the Vichy regime. This, his seminal work, was originally published in the 1970s and has been updated with a new preface. Despite the availability of additional data, the book stands with very few qualifications as originally written. Vichy, despite the claims of it's many apologists, neither protected nor served France and the French, with the exception of various professional elites, who seamlessly transitioned from Petain's regime to the Fourth Republic and, in some instances, to the Fifth. Petain and his confreres met little, if any, indigenous resistance because virtually all Frenchmen were disgusted with the Third Republic and craved a more ordered and traditional form of government, an authoritarian one, in a word. Petain was happy to oblige, basing the regime on the assumptions that the war would be short, Germany would be victorious, the (despised) British holdouts would soon be defeated and, most importantly, domestic revolution would be avoided. This last point cannot be overestimated in the conservative, Catholic society of mid-century France. The leftist riots of February 6, 1934 left an indelible impression which Vichy could and did use to telling effect. It should be recalled that de Gaulle stood virtually alone. Most Frenchmen, especially those in military and government service chose to support the regime, even to the point of fighting the British in North Africa, not only in relatively well-known engagements at Mers el Kabir, but also in Syria and domestically in Dieppe. Vichy mostly hoped to achieve parity with Nazi allies in a German-dominated post-war Europe, also hoping to retain their colonial empire under exclusive French administration. Paxton recalls all these details and plenty more, along with a welter of statistical detail which somewhat slows the narrative. Even so, the work is exceptional and a classic of the historian's art.

The French Quest for Collaboration

I used this book as the main source for a term paper I recently wrote on Vichy France. Although it is now a bit dated-it was originally published in 1972-it was a groundbreaking work when it was first published. With this work, Mr. Paxton destroyed the myth of the massive French Resistance to the Germans that was propagated for many years after the war, mostly by the French themselves. He thoroughly describes how it was France, not Germany, who sought greater collaboration between the two countries, and that many more Frenchmen than would like to admit wholeheartedly embraced the new fascist policies. And while of course there was a genuine resistance movement, Paxton sees the post-war witch hunt of "collaborationists" as basically a persecution of the guilty by the guilty. To this day, Vichy is still a touchy subject for Frenchmen and Paxton brilliantly exposes exactly why that is. This is an extremely well-written and comprehensive work on Vichy France and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

A better understanding of the French

This book was first written in 1972 when the fifty-year seal on Vichy documents was still in effect, and has been updated since. But Paxton did a very good job of gathering good material from Nazi archives and others to deliver a book which required very little revision once more documents became available. The book was explosive when first published because it shattered the Hollywood myth of brave French resistance fighters arm-in-arm with the Allied forces beating back their German occupiers. The truth was much more complicated, but basically France was so politically divided in the 1930's that it was impotent in dealing with the threat of a Hitler. That impotence translated into the Vichy government led by Petain and his numerous cabinet officers who were far more likely to assist the Nazis than confront them. Double dealing, scheming, back stabbing, corrupt, duplicitous; the regime was a training ground for the kind of French diplomacy which continues to this day. Numerous attempts were made by the Vichy regime at reaching a lasting peace with Hitler and included proposals for France to be an ally with Nazi Germany's new world order after the Brits and later the Americans were defeated. It was only after the tide was turning against the Germans did the French resistance begin to gain popular support and shift to DeGaulle from Petain and his fellow collaborators. Even the Nazis were appalled by the lack of principle when the French offered up native French Jews for transport to German concentration camps when the Nazis never demanded they be turned over. French workers in Germany freed up enough manpower for Germany to field many more divisions than they otherwise could have been able to. While the same could be said of "neutral" Sweden, without whose willingness to supply the steel needed by the Nazi war machine would have forced Germany to cut back its standing army by hundreds of thousands, at least the Swedes have never tried to cover up the fact that they did it for the money. This is a very good book, and the kind of historical research which is sorely lacking in many books today which purport to cover history but usually wind up offering a hidden political agenda. For those who are interested in this subject I recommend Chabrol's video "Eye of Vichy" which is an amazingly brave film of Vichy propaganda that put pictures to the words of Paxton's book. With "friends" like France during WWII, we didn't need any enemies. The fact that France was given a permanent seat in the UN Security Council after its role during WWII is a living legacy of Roosevelt's infirmity in his last months.

a breakthrough book, but a bit slanted

paxton's book was a breakthrough in that it showed to what a huge extent the vichy regime's odious policies weren't simply imposed by the germans, but were carrying out willingly and represented the revenge of right-wing, catholic, nationalistic france against the left, unions, and jews and other foreigners. but at times the book goes a little too far and borders on cheap anti-frenchness. his denunciations of the vichy regime and the elements of france they represented are well backed up, but he's on much shakier ground when he tries to downplay the role of and support for the resistance and charles de gaulle. overall, a chilling, important book, but it should be read as a book about vichy, and not as a definitive book about all aspects of france under the occupation, as it purports to be.