Robert Paxton

Robert O. Paxton (born 1932 in Lexington, Virginia) is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era.

Biography

Paxton was born in Lexington, Virginia, and studied at Washington and Lee University for B.A. He earned his M.A. at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University.

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 New York, where he is now Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History.

Paxton was called to testify at the trial of Maurice Papon (1910–2007), who was convicted for crimes against humanity in 1998.

In April, 2009, the French government awarded Paxton the Legion d'honneur.

Academic Work

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. It is considered one of the path-breaking works on France in the Vichy era. Its thesis has earned respect among both American and French historians. Paxton was the co-writer of Claude Chabrol's The Eye of Vichy.

Additionally, Paxton has put forward a 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][2][3]

References and notes

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 and Michael Marrus, "The Nazis and the Jews in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 54, No. 4, December 1982.
• Robert O. Paxton, "French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgeres' Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929-1939"," 1997.
• Robert O. Paxton, "The Five Stages of Fascism," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 70, No. 1, March 1998.
• Robert O. Paxton, "Anatomy of Fascism,” 2004.

External links

• Vichy vs. the Nazis - The New York Review of Books
• "Faculty Bio: Robert Faxton". Columbia University Website. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/history/fac-bios/Paxton/faculty.html. Retrieved 14 January 2012.