“Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples.” In contrast to other “isms,” the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”
—Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood 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.”
—Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
“If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.” Paxton scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one. Hitler was not elected, he noted, but legally appointed by the conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg...In Italy, Mussolini was also legitimately appointed. “The king chose him,” Paxton said, “Mussolini didn’t really have to march on Rome.” Trump’s power, Paxton suggested, appears to be different. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said. “Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”
—Robert Paxton, from interview with Elisabeth Zerofsky "Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind”, New York Times magazine, October 23, 2024
The Anatomy of Fascism. by Robert Paxton.
Vintage Books. 2004
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.
Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism.
Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism.
by Elisabeth Zerofsky
October 23, 2024
New York Times
The historian Robert Paxton spent Jan. 6, 2021, glued to his television. Paxton was at his apartment in Upper Manhattan when he watched a mob march toward the Capitol, overrun the security barriers and then the police cordons and break inside. Many in the crowd wore red MAGA baseball caps, while some sported bright-orange beanies signaling their membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. A few were dressed more fantastically. Who are these characters in camouflage and antlers? he wondered. “I was absolutely riveted by it,” Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. “I didn’t imagine such a spectacle was possible.”
Listen to this article, read by Julia Whelan
Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,” traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past.
The work seemed freshly relevant when Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination in 2016 and articles comparing American politics with Europe’s in the 1930s began to proliferate in the American press. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic for The New York Times, was among the first to set the tone. She turned a review of a new Hitler biography into a thinly veiled allegory about a “clown” and a “dunderhead,” an egomaniac and pathological liar with a talent for reading and exploiting weakness. In The Washington Post, the conservative commentator Robert Kagan wrote: “This is how fascism comes to America. Not with jackboots and salutes,” but “with a television huckster.”
In a column for a French newspaper, republished in early 2017 in Harper’s Magazine, Paxton urged restraint. “We should hesitate before applying this most toxic of labels,” he warned. Paxton acknowledged that Trump’s “scowl” and his “jutting jaw” recalled “Mussolini’s absurd theatrics,” and that Trump was fond of blaming “foreigners and despised minorities” for ‘‘national decline.’’ These, Paxton wrote, were all staples of fascism. But the word was used with such abandon — “everyone you don’t like is a fascist,” he said — that it had lost its power to illuminate. Despite the superficial resemblances, there were too many dissimilarities. The first fascists, he wrote, “promised to overcome national weakness and decline by strengthening the state, subordinating the interests of individuals to those of the community.” Trump and his cronies wanted, by contrast, to “subordinate community interests to individual interests — at least those of wealthy individuals.”
After Trump took office, a torrent of articles, papers and books either embraced the fascism analogy as useful and necessary, or criticized it as misleading and unhelpful. The polemic was so unrelenting, especially on social media, that it came to be known among historians as the Fascism Debate. Paxton had, by this point, been retired for more than a decade from Columbia University, where he was a professor of history for more than 30 years, and he didn’t pay attention to, let alone participate in, online debates.
PHOTO: Paxton was reluctant to join other historians in equating Trumpism with fascism. Jan. 6 changed his mind. Credit: Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”
When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
Until then, most scholars arguing in favor of the fascism label were not specialists. Paxton was. Those who for years had been making the case that Trumpism equaled fascism took Paxton’s column as a vindication. “He probably did more with that one piece than all these other historians who’ve written numerous books since 2016, and appeared on television, and who have 300,000 Twitter followers,” says Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an assistant professor at Wesleyan and the editor of a recent collection of essays, “Did it Happen Here?” Samuel Moyn, a historian at Yale University, said that to cite Paxton is to make “an authority claim — you can’t beat it.”
This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”
PHOTO: Benito Mussolini (center) and his Blackshirts. The Blackshirts, who had assembled outside Rome in a show of force, entered the capital city in 1922. Credit: Amerigo Petitti/Mondadori, via Everett Collection
Calling someone or something “fascist” is the supreme expression of moral revulsion, an emotional impulse that is difficult to resist. “The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable,” the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote in 2021. “How better to express the fear, loathing, and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil?” The word gets lobbed at the left too, including by Trump at Democrats. But fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?
Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both. Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”
Paxton, who speaks with the lilt of a midcentury TV announcer or studio star, is an elegant, reserved man, with a dapper swoop of hair, long gone white, his face etched with deep lines. He and his wife, the artist Sarah Plimpton, moved out of New York City, where they lived for 50 years near the Columbia campus, only a few years ago. He told me that what he saw on Jan. 6 has continued to affect him; it has been hard “to accept the other side as fellow citizens with legitimate grievances.” That is not to say, he clarified, that there aren’t legitimate grievances to be had, but that the politics of addressing them has changed. He believes that Trumpism has become something that is “not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,” Paxton said. “I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.”
Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”
Paxton was not quite 40 when he published his groundbreaking book about the Vichy regime. In demonstrating that France’s leaders actively sought collaboration with the Nazis and that much of the public initially supported them, he showed that the country’s wartime experience was not simply imposed but arose from its own internal political and cultural crises: a dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence.
Later in his career, Paxton began to write comparatively about fascist movements across Europe in the 1920s and ’30s: what caused them to grow and win power (as in Italy and Germany) or to fail (as in Britain). The work was a response to what he saw as a fundamental misconception on the part of some of his peers, who defined fascism as an ideology. “It seems doubtful,” Paxton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1994, “that some common intellectual position can be the defining character of movements that valued action above thought, the instincts of the blood above reason, duty to the community above intellectual freedom, and national particularism above any kind of universal value. Is fascism an ‘ism’ at all?” Fascism, he argued, was propelled more by feelings than ideas.
Fascist movements succeeded, Paxton wrote, in environments in which liberal democracy stood accused of producing divisions and decline. That remains true not just of the United States today but also of Europe, especially France, where the far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen has inched closer and closer to power with each election cycle. “Marine Le Pen has gone to considerable lengths to insist that there is no common ground between her movement and the Vichy regime,” Paxton told me. “For me, to the contrary, she seems to occupy much the same space within the political system. She carries forward similar issues about authority, internal order, fear of decline and of ‘the other.’”
Fifty years after “Vichy France” was published, it remains a remarkable book. It offers jarring details on the material and practical support provided to Nazi Germany by France, the largest supplier to the German war economy of both food and foreign male laborers in all of occupied Europe. But it also illuminates, with clarity and a degree of even-handedness that feels astonishing today, the competing historical and political traditions — progressive versus Catholic traditionalist, republican versus ancien-régime — that created the turbulent conditions in which Vichy could prevail and that continue to drive French politics today.
“Vichy France,” published in France in 1973, profoundly shook the nation’s self-image, and Paxton is still something of a household name — his picture appears in some French high school history textbooks. He often comes up in the mudslinging of French politics. Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and one-time presidential candidate, who has sought to sanitize far-right politics in France by rehabilitating Vichy, has attacked Paxton and the historical consensus he represents.
PHOTO: Paxton’s book “Vichy France,” published in France in 1973, forced the country to reckon with its Nazi collaborationist past. Credit: From Robert O. Paxton
In “Vichy France,” Paxton asserted that “the deeds of occupied and occupier alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.” The book was a “national scandal,” Paxton said. “People were quite horrified.” Paxton’s adversaries called him a naïf: He was American and had no history of his own. “I said, ‘Oh, boy, you don’t know anything,’” Paxton told me.
Paxton was born in 1932 and raised in Lexington, a small town in the Appalachian hills of western Virginia. As he wrote in the introduction to “Vichy France” when it was reissued in 2001, his own family “still brooded, a century later, about its decline after the death of my great-grandfather in the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863.” Paxton’s father was a lawyer and publisher of the local newspaper, and his family was liberal, but nonetheless they could see the “substantial house on a hilltop” that had belonged to his father’s grandfather, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, occupied by another family since 1865. “The bitterness of the defeated South tended to express itself in the study of history,” he wrote. “My fellow Southerners spent their time researching, debating, commemorating, rewriting, even re-enacting their four-year ‘war for Southern independence.’” Surely, he thought, he would find in France “an equally active fascination with the history of Vichy.”
Paxton chose to study European history to get away from American history, especially the South, which “felt rather stultifying,” he said. His parents sent him to Exeter for his last two years of high school, but instead of going on to Harvard or Yale, he decided to return to Lexington to attend Washington and Lee University, like generations of Paxtons before him. After graduating, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, did two years of military service, working for the Navy leadership in Washington, and then went to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. In 1960, he arrived in France to begin research for his dissertation.
Paris at the time was brimming with rumors of an impending coup by French generals who were fighting to keep Algeria, then a colony, French, and who were angry that the government in Paris was not supporting them. The notion of an Army officer class that was loyal to the nation but not to its current government was, to Paxton, a resonant one. He wanted to write about how the officers were trained, but when he went to search the military academy’s archives, he was told they were bombed in 1944. A French adviser suggested that he focus instead on the Vichy period, a time of great confusion. But it had been only 15 years since the end of the war, and France had a rule about keeping archives closed for 50 years. Fortunately, Paxton also spoke German, and so there was another resource: the German archives, which had been captured by Allied forces and made accessible on microfilm.
As he sorted through documents, Paxton began to question the narrative about Vichy that became dominant after the war. The French held that the Nazis maintained total dominion over France, and that Vichy was doing only what was necessary to protect the nation while waiting for liberation — the so-called double game. But this did not correspond to the records. “What I was finding was a total mismatch,” Paxton told me. “The French popular narrative of the war had been that they’d all been resisters, even if only in their thoughts. And the archives were just packed with people clamoring, defense companies wanting to construct things for the German Army, people who wanted to have jobs, people who wanted to have social contacts.”
PHOTO: The 1945 trial of Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain (center, hand to ear), who headed France’s collaborationist Vichy government during German occupation. He was convicted of treason but ultimately spared the death penalty. Credit: The New York Times
In his book, Paxton argued that the shock and devastation of France’s 1940 military defeat, for which many French blamed the four years of socialist government and the cultural liberalization that preceded it, had primed France to accept — even support — its collaborationist government. After World War I, France was a power in decline, squeezed between the mass production of the United States and the strength of the newly formed Soviet Union. Many French citizens saw the loss of France’s prestige as a symptom of social decay. These sentiments created the conditions for the Vichy government to bring about what they called “the national revolution”: an ideological transformation of France that included anti-Jewish laws and, eventually, deportation.
Every major French publication and broadcast reviewed the book. One reviewer sarcastically congratulated Paxton for solving France’s problems. Another offered “hearty cheers to this academic sitting in his chair on the other side of the Atlantic, 30 years later.” Many commentators, however, recognized that perhaps only an outsider could have accomplished what he did. It was true that the postwar narrative was already being publicly challenged: “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a searing 1969 documentary about French collaboration, and the controversial pardon of a Vichy parapolice leader raised questions among the younger generation about what actually happened during that period. But it was Paxton who “legitimized changes that were in the process of happening in French society,” Henry Rousso, a French historian and expert on Vichy, told me. “He had the allure of a Hollywood star. He was the perfect American for the French.”
Paxton’s scholarship became the foundation for an entirely new field of research that would transform France’s official memory of World War II from one of resistance to one of complicity. It came to be known as the Paxtonian revolution. Yet even at the time, Paxton was judicious about the uses and misuses of “fascism.” In “Vichy France,” he acknowledged that “well past the halfway point of this book, the term fascism has hardly appeared.” This was not, he continued, “to deny any kinship between Vichy France and other radical right regimes of the 20th century,” but because “the word fascism has been debased into epithet, making it a less and less useful tool for analyzing political movements of our times.”
To describe the French case as “fascism,” Paxton went on, was to dismiss “the whole occupation experience as something alien to French life, an aberration unthinkable without foreign troops imposing their will.” This, he warned, was a “mental shortcut” that “conceals the deep taproots linking Vichy policies to the major conflicts of the Third Republic.” That is, to everything that came before.
In determining what counts as fascism, many historians still rely on parameters that came from Paxton. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, historians argued about how best to understand and define it. Paxton wasn’t much involved in those debates, but by the early ’90s, he found himself dissatisfied with their conclusions. Their scholarship focused on ideas, ideology and political programs. “I found it bizarre how every time someone set out to publish a book or write an article about fascism, they began with the program,” Paxton told me when we met again, at Le Monde, a French bistro near the Columbia campus. “The program was usually transactional,” he said over our very French lunch of omelets and frites. “It was there to try to gain followers at a certain period. But it certainly didn’t determine what they did.”
In 1998, Paxton published a highly influential journal article titled “The Five Stages of Fascism,” which became the basis for his canonical 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism.” In the article, Paxton argued that one problem in trying to define fascism arose from the “ambiguous relationship between doctrine and action.” Scholars and intellectuals naturally wished to classify movements according to what their leaders said they believed. But it was a mistake, he said, to treat fascism as if it were comparable with 19th-century doctrines like liberalism, conservatism or socialism. “Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples,” he wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” In contrast to other “isms,” “the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”
Whatever promises fascists made early on, Paxton argued, were only distantly related to what they did once they gained and exercised power. As they made the necessary compromises with existing elites to establish dominance, they demonstrated what he called a “contempt for doctrine,” in which they simply ignored their original beliefs and acted “in ways quite contrary to them.” Fascism, Paxton argued, was best thought of as a political behavior, one marked by “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”
The book, already a staple of college syllabuses, became increasingly popular during the Trump years — to many, the echoes were unmistakable.
***
When Paxton announced his change of mind about Trump in his 2021 Newsweek column, he continued to emphasize that the historical circumstances were “profoundly different.” Nonetheless, the column had a significant impact on the ongoing, and newly fierce, debate over whether Trump could be labeled a fascist. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of Italian Fascism at New York University, says that the column’s importance lay not only in the messenger, but also in marking Jan. 6 as a “radicalizing event.” In his 1998 article, Paxton outlined how fascism evolved, either toward entropy or radicalization. “When somebody allies with extremists to get to power and to sustain them, you have a logic of radicalization,” Ben-Ghiat says. “And we saw this happening.”
Not everyone was persuaded. Samuel Moyn, the Yale historian, told me it was impossible not to admire Paxton — “he’s a scholar’s scholar, while also making a huge political difference” — but he still disagreed. In 2020, Moyn argued in The New York Review of Books that the problem with comparisons is that they can prevent us from seeing novelty. In particular, Moyn was concerned about the same “mental shortcuts” that Paxton warned against more than 50 years earlier. “I wanted to say, Well, wait, it’s the Republican Party, along with the Democratic Party, that led to Trump, through neoliberalism and wars abroad,” Moyn told me. “It just seems that there’s a distinctiveness to this phenomenon that maybe makes it not very helpful to use the analogy.”
Michael Kimmage, a historian at Catholic University who specializes in the history of the Cold War and worked at the State Department, told me that even when it comes to Putin, a good candidate for the “fascist” label, the use of the word often generates a noxious incuriousness. “It becomes the enemy of nuance,” Kimmage says. “The only thing that provides predictive value in foreign policy, in my experience, is regime type,” Kimmage says. He argues that Putin has not behaved as a full-blown fascist, because his regime depends on maintaining order and stability, and that affects how he wages war. It should affect how the United States responds too.
But for those who use the label to describe Trump, it is useful precisely because it has offered a predictive framework. “It’s kind of a hypothesis,” John Ganz, the author of a new book on the radical right in the 1990s, told me. “What does it tell us about the next steps that Trump may take? I would say that as a theory of Trumpism, it’s one of the better ones.” No one expects Trumpism to look like Nazism, or to follow a specific timeline, but some anticipated that “using street paramilitary forces he might do some kind of extralegal attempt to seize power,” Ganz said. “Well, that’s what he did.”
Hitler in Germany in 1933, the year he became chancellor.Credit: Andreas Wolochow/Shutterstock
Some of the most ardent proponents of the fascism label have taken it quite a bit further. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder offers lessons on fighting Trumpism lifted from totalitarian Germany in the 1930s in the way that many other historians find unhelpful. But the debate is not just an intellectual one; it’s also about actual tactics. Some on the far left accuse prominent figures in the political center (whom Moyn calls “Cold War liberals”) of wielding the label against Trump to get them to fall in line with the Democratic Party, despite having strong differences with parts of its platform. Steinmetz-Jenkins told me that he objects to the attitude that “what matters is winning, so let’s create an enemy, let’s call it fascism for the purpose of galvanizing consensus.” And this kind of politics, Kimmage notes, also comes with its own dangers. “Sometimes waving that banner, ‘You fascists on the other side, and we the valiant anti-fascists,’ is a way of just not thinking about how one as an individual or as part of a class might be contributing to the problem,” he says.
Paxton has not weighed in on the issue since the Newsweek column, spending much of his time immersed in his life’s second passion, bird-watching. At his home in the Hudson Valley, I read back to him one of his earlier definitions of fascism, which he described as a “mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force . . . distinct not only from enemies on the left but also from rivals on the right.” I asked him if he thought it described Trumpism. “It does,” he said. Nonetheless, he remains committed to his yes-no paradigm of accuracy and usefulness. “I’m not pushing the term because I don’t think it does the job very well now,” Paxton told me. “I think there are ways of being more explicit about the specific danger Trump represents.”
When we met, Kamala Harris had just assumed the Democratic nomination. “I think it’s going to be very dicey,” he said. “If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.” He scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one. Hitler was not elected, he noted, but legally appointed by the conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg. “One theory,” he said, “is that if Hindenburg hadn’t been talked into choosing Hitler, the bubble had already burst, and you would have come up with an ordinary conservative and not a fascist as the new chancellor of Germany. And I think that that’s a plausible counterfactual, Hitler was on the downward slope.” In Italy, Mussolini was also legitimately appointed. “The king chose him,” Paxton said, “Mussolini didn’t really have to march on Rome.”
Trump’s power, Paxton suggested, appears to be different. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said. “Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”
Read by Julia Whelan
Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck
Engineered by Quinton Kamara
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elisabeth Zerofsky is a contributing writer for the magazine who has reported extensively on European and American politics. She is currently at work on a book about the rise of the far right. Her last article was on the divisions within the French left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Paxton
Early life
Paxton was born on June 15, 1932, in Lexington, Virginia.[1] 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,[2] where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963.[3]
Career
Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley[2] and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1969. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997. He remains a professor emeritus. He has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017.[4]
Vichy
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.[5] 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.[5]
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.[3]
Paxtonian revolution
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.[6]
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."[7]
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.[8]
Awards
In 2009, the French government awarded Paxton the Légion d'honneur, the highest French order of merit.[19]
Personal life
Paxton is an avid birdwatcher and a former president of the Linnaean Society of New York.[4]
Works
Parades and Politics at Vichy (1966), Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691051420.
L'Armée de Vichy (Paris: Tallandier Éditions, 2004), French translation.
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (1972), Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 9780394473604.
A new introduction prefaced the Morningside Edition published by Columbia University Press, 1982, ISBN 0231054270
Another new introduction prefaced the 2001 publication by Columbia University Press, ISBN 0231124694.
with W. J. Boyle Jr, and D. A. Cutler. "Hudson-Delaware region." American Birds 32 (1978): 326–331.
"The German Opposition to Hitler: A Non-Germanist's View." Central European History 14.4 (1981): 362–368.
Vichy France and the Jews (1981), with Michael Marrus.
A new edition was published in 1995 by Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804724997.
"The Nazis and the Jews in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944" (1982), with Michael Marrus, The Journal of Modern History vol. 54, no. 4. pp 687–714. online
"Anti-Americanism in the Years of Collaboration and Resistance." in The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism ed. by Denis Lacorne et al. (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1990) pp. 55–66.
With Mame Warren. "Oral History Interview with Robert O. Paxton, April 18, 1996." online.
French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgere's Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929-1939 (1997).
"The Five Stages of Fascism Archived August 27, 2018, at the Wayback Machine" (1998), The Journal of Modern History vol. 70, no. 1.
The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. ISBN 1-4000-4094-9.
"Vichy vs. the Nazis" (2008), The New York Review of Books.
"Comparisons and definitions." The Oxford Handbook of Fascism ed The Oxford Handbook of Fascism ed by R.J.B. Bosworth (2010) pp 547–565.
Europe in the Twentieth Century with co-author Julie Hessler, (1st ed. 1975; 5th edition, Wadsworth/Cengage 2011)
"Vichy Lives!—In a way." The New York Review of Books (April 25, 2013) online.
"American Duce: Is Donald Trump a Fascist or a Plutocrat?" Harper's Magazine (May 2017) online.
with Manuel Bragança, and Fransiska Louwagie. "Interview with Robert O. Paxton, on the Writing of History and Ego-history." in Ego-histories of France and the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018. 19–22).
"Entering the Profession at the End of the Cold War" (2004, revised for H-DIPLO 2020 autobiography
See also
Vichy syndrome
Further reading
J. Sweets, ′Chaque livre un événement: Robert Paxton and the French, from the brisuer de glace to iconoclaste tranquille′, in S. Fishman et al. (eds.), France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 21–34.
Moshik Temkin, ′Avec un certain malaise: The Paxtonian Trauma in France, 1973-74′, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 291–306.
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to Robert Paxton.
"Robert O. Paxton - Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences". Columbia University. Archived from the original on May 18, 2017. Retrieved September 25, 2012.
Paxton, Robert O. (January 7, 2016). "Is Fascism Back?". Project Syndicate. Retrieved March 21, 2016.
Paxton, Robert O. (11 January 2021). "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now." Newsweek. Retrieved 8 February 2021.
Robert Paxton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Early life
Paxton was born on June 15, 1932, in Lexington, Virginia.[1] 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,[2] where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963.[3]
Career
Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley[2] and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1969. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997. He remains a professor emeritus. He has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017.[4]
Vichy
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.[5] 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.[5]
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.[3]
Paxtonian revolution
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.[6]
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."[7]
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.[8]
French reaction and debate
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".[5] 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.[5] 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.[9] The reaction among Resistance groups was mixed due to Paxton's argument that there was no serious Resistance until well into 1941.[10]
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."[11]
Today, the book is considered a historical classic and one of the best studies on France in the Vichy era.[3] It is so influential that Richard Vinen said that his
interpretation is completely orthodox, perhaps excessively orthodox, in France. In a funny way, Eric Zemmour's right to say that Paxton has become a pillar of the French establishment ... Historians will one day move beyond Paxton. In some ways, it's been hard for French people to do that because it seems as if you're making an apology for the Vichy government ... But even when people do turn against Paxton, they'll still say that this is a wonderful book, a classic example of how you might do a certain kind of history.[12]
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.[13] The New York Times review of the book was written by Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor and scholar on France.[14]
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.[15]
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".[5] 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.[5] 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.[9] The reaction among Resistance groups was mixed due to Paxton's argument that there was no serious Resistance until well into 1941.[10]
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."[11]
Today, the book is considered a historical classic and one of the best studies on France in the Vichy era.[3] It is so influential that Richard Vinen said that his
interpretation is completely orthodox, perhaps excessively orthodox, in France. In a funny way, Eric Zemmour's right to say that Paxton has become a pillar of the French establishment ... Historians will one day move beyond Paxton. In some ways, it's been hard for French people to do that because it seems as if you're making an apology for the Vichy government ... But even when people do turn against Paxton, they'll still say that this is a wonderful book, a classic example of how you might do a certain kind of history.[12]
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.[13] The New York Times review of the book was written by Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor and scholar on France.[14]
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.[15]
Fascism
Paxton has focused his work on exploring models and definition of fascism.
In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine like communism or socialism. Instead, he focuses on fascism's political context and functional development. The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy progressed through all five:
1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power
4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
Paxton has focused his work on exploring models and definition of fascism.
In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine like communism or socialism. Instead, he focuses on fascism's political context and functional development. The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy progressed through all five:
1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power
4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
5.Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.[16]Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
In his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton refines his five-stage model and puts forward the following definition for 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.[17]
In 2021, Paxton wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in which he stated that he now believed Donald Trump was a fascist, after insisting for several years that he was instead a right-wing populist. Trump's incitement of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was the deciding factor in him changing his view.[18]
In his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton refines his five-stage model and puts forward the following definition for 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.[17]
In 2021, Paxton wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in which he stated that he now believed Donald Trump was a fascist, after insisting for several years that he was instead a right-wing populist. Trump's incitement of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was the deciding factor in him changing his view.[18]
Awards
In 2009, the French government awarded Paxton the Légion d'honneur, the highest French order of merit.[19]
Personal life
Paxton is an avid birdwatcher and a former president of the Linnaean Society of New York.[4]
Works
Parades and Politics at Vichy (1966), Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691051420.
L'Armée de Vichy (Paris: Tallandier Éditions, 2004), French translation.
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (1972), Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 9780394473604.
A new introduction prefaced the Morningside Edition published by Columbia University Press, 1982, ISBN 0231054270
Another new introduction prefaced the 2001 publication by Columbia University Press, ISBN 0231124694.
with W. J. Boyle Jr, and D. A. Cutler. "Hudson-Delaware region." American Birds 32 (1978): 326–331.
"The German Opposition to Hitler: A Non-Germanist's View." Central European History 14.4 (1981): 362–368.
Vichy France and the Jews (1981), with Michael Marrus.
A new edition was published in 1995 by Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804724997.
"The Nazis and the Jews in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944" (1982), with Michael Marrus, The Journal of Modern History vol. 54, no. 4. pp 687–714. online
"Anti-Americanism in the Years of Collaboration and Resistance." in The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism ed. by Denis Lacorne et al. (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1990) pp. 55–66.
With Mame Warren. "Oral History Interview with Robert O. Paxton, April 18, 1996." online.
French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgere's Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929-1939 (1997).
"The Five Stages of Fascism Archived August 27, 2018, at the Wayback Machine" (1998), The Journal of Modern History vol. 70, no. 1.
The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. ISBN 1-4000-4094-9.
"Vichy vs. the Nazis" (2008), The New York Review of Books.
"Comparisons and definitions." The Oxford Handbook of Fascism ed The Oxford Handbook of Fascism ed by R.J.B. Bosworth (2010) pp 547–565.
Europe in the Twentieth Century with co-author Julie Hessler, (1st ed. 1975; 5th edition, Wadsworth/Cengage 2011)
"Vichy Lives!—In a way." The New York Review of Books (April 25, 2013) online.
"American Duce: Is Donald Trump a Fascist or a Plutocrat?" Harper's Magazine (May 2017) online.
with Manuel Bragança, and Fransiska Louwagie. "Interview with Robert O. Paxton, on the Writing of History and Ego-history." in Ego-histories of France and the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018. 19–22).
"Entering the Profession at the End of the Cold War" (2004, revised for H-DIPLO 2020 autobiography
See also
Vichy syndrome
Further reading
J. Sweets, ′Chaque livre un événement: Robert Paxton and the French, from the brisuer de glace to iconoclaste tranquille′, in S. Fishman et al. (eds.), France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 21–34.
Moshik Temkin, ′Avec un certain malaise: The Paxtonian Trauma in France, 1973-74′, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 291–306.
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to Robert Paxton.
"Robert O. Paxton - Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences". Columbia University. Archived from the original on May 18, 2017. Retrieved September 25, 2012.
Paxton, Robert O. (January 7, 2016). "Is Fascism Back?". Project Syndicate. Retrieved March 21, 2016.
Paxton, Robert O. (11 January 2021). "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now." Newsweek. Retrieved 8 February 2021.
