Paxtonian revolution įor decades prior to the 1970s modern period, French historiography was dominated by conservative or pro-Communist thinking, neither of them very inclined to consider the grass-roots pro-democracy developments at liberation. However, the translation sold thousands of copies, particularly to the young generation shaped by the civil unrest of May 1968 and who were uninterested in the "cozy mythologies" of Vichy apologists. During a televised debate with Paxton in 1976, the Vichy naval leader Gabriel Auphan called him a liar. Upon the book's publication in French translation in 1973, Paxton became the subject of intense vitriol from French historians and commentators. He argued that the reforms undertaken by the Vichy government prefigured the reforms of the 1950s and 1960s and derived from Vichy's aim to transform French society. Unlike Aron and Henri Michel, Paxton did not play down Vichy's achievements in his explanation of its domestic agenda. In opposition to the traditional view pioneered by Robert Aron, he argued that the Vichy government was eager to collaborate with Nazi Germany and did not practice "passive resistance" to German rule.
Paxton is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. He has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997. 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. at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years earning an M.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954. After attending secondary school in New England, he received a B.A.
Paxton was born on June 15, 1932, in Lexington, Virginia. He is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which precipitated intense debate in France, and led to a paradigm shift in how the events of the Vichy regime are interpreted. He is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University.
Robert Owen Paxton (born June 15, 1932) is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era.
0 kommentar(er)
