Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 by Robert O. Paxton Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944
Book Review: Path-breaking
Summary: 5 Stars
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.Book Review: Vichy France
Summary: 2 Stars
The history is good but hard to read without insights into the people and the aftermate after the war.Book Review: Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order
Summary: 4 Stars
Reviewers who found it a revelation that Vichy grew out of French history instead of being a puppet state set up by the Germans had presumably not read much French history before--Maurras and Daudet's backlash aaginst the Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair, the prewar fascist leagues, even French anglophobia, all well documented and date from long before July 1940. Significantly some of these pre-Vichy French proto-fascists were far from pro-German.
However (and even though scholarship has swung back slightly the other way), this 1970s revisionist account was a major work and is still a "must" for anyone studying pre-1945 France. One can still see the value of the book without concluding "Weren't the French awful?" or "So De Gaulle wasn't their hero during the war".
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