Роберт Пэкстон: Виши Франциясы және фашизм тарихындағы жаңа көзқарас

American political scientist and historian

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. He is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University. 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.

Paxton was born on June 15, 1932, in Lexington, Virginia. After attending secondary school in New England, he received a B. A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years earning an M. A. at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a Ph. D. from Harvard University in 1963.

Paxton is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940 1944. 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. Unlike Aron and Henri Michel, Paxton did not play down Vichy's achievements in his explanation of its domestic agenda. 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. Upon the book's publication in French translation in 1973, Paxton became the subject of intense vitriol from French historians and commentators. During a televised debate with Paxton in 1976, the Vichy naval leader Gabriel Auphan called him a liar. 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.

For 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. There was little recognition in French scholarship on the active participation of the Vichy regime in the deportation of French Jews, until Paxton's 1972 book appeared. The book received a French translation within a year and sold thousands of copies in France. In the words of French historian Gérard Noiriel, the book "had the effect of a bombshell, because it showed, with supporting evidence, that the French state had participated in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi concentration camps, a fact that had been concealed by historians until then." The "Paxtonian revolution", as the French called it, had a profound effect on French historiography. In 1997, Paxton was called as an expert witness to testify about collaboration during the Vichy period, at the trial in France of Maurice Papon.

Marc Ferro, a French historian, wrote that Vichy France would make the left feel uneasy by its contradiction of their belief that only the élite had betrayed France in 1940, "whereas in reality heroic resistance to the last man from Bayonne to Africa made no sense for anyone". He also noted that the Gaullists would object to Paxton's portrayal of them as "heirs of the regime they fought against" and that it would disturb all those who believed that Pétain had played a "double game" between the Axis and the Allies. Communists welcomed the book for buttressing their belief that Vichy had been the product of state monopoly capitalism, and it was also applauded by Jewish groups. The reaction among Resistance groups was mixed due to Paxton's argument that there was no serious Resistance until well into 1941. In the preface to the 1982 edition of Vichy France, Paxton disagreed with the assertion of his opponents that he had written in "easy moral superiority" from the perspective of a "victor": "In fact [it] was written in the shadow of the war in Vietnam, which sharpened my animosity against nationalist conformism of all kinds. Writing in the late 1960s, what concerned me was not the comparison with defeated France but the confident swagger of the Germans in the summer of 1940." Today, the book is considered a historical classic and one of the best studies on France in the Vichy era. It was published at a time when French historians and filmmakers were also exploring history under the Vichy regime, as in Marcel Ophüls' influential two part documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). In 1981, Paxton and historian Michael R. Marrus co published the book, Vichy France and the Jews, which examined the Vichy regime's policy towards the Jews during World War II. The New York Times review of the book was written by Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor and scholar on France. As an expert on the Vichy era, Paxton co wrote Claude Chabrol's 1993 documentary The Eye of Vichy. In 1997 he testified at the trial of Vichy bureaucrat Maurice Papon.

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

Paxton is an avid birdwatcher and a former president of the Linnaean Society of New York.