About book Vichy France: Old Guard And New Order 1940-1944 (2001)
this is the book i want to write, except i want to write it about algeria, and not vichy. it's impossible to overestimate the impact this book had on modern France, and the history of the country. it has been said (and rightly so) that this book could not have been written by a frenchman - it had to be done by an outsider. this was the first book to really explode the history/memory conflict, and call into question all the history that everyone believed to be true regarding WWII. this is the story that answers the now-famous question in france, "what did you do during the war, daddy?" france was occupied from the beginning of the war, and set up a collaborationist government in the south of france, in vichy. this government colluded with the germans to export at least 8,000 french jews to the concentration camps east. that means, the french government themselves made the lists and rounded these people up. while the number is small, it is mostly small because those are the only ones with proof. it's important to note also that france was amazingly anti-semitic (see the dryfuss affair to start), and if the war was based merely on ideology, france probably would have aligned with germany. but because of the deep fissures between the countries and their terrorial arguments, vichy is what happened. the pervasive national narrative up until paxton was the story of the french resistance and charles de gaulle. there was no mention of vichy, no mention of papon and barbi and the others that would be tried for crimes against humanity forty years after the war. and with one book, paxton toppled one of the most popular heroic narratives to exist after WWII.honestly, this is the book that started the contemporary history movement (that is based largely in france, with henri rousso doing most of the heading up stuff), that started asking questions of the heroic war narrative - asking, wait, what really happened? what aren't you telling us? what is the story of the losers? did people disagree? what is the dark side? I LOVE THIS BOOK.
I got this book because after years of liking the movie, "Casablanca", and knowing very little except that it was a temporary government permitted by the Germans, I wanted to know something about Vichy.I was hoping for a book that might explain a) why the Germans allowed/created this entity, b) how it operated, and c) how did it affect the lives of people in France and French territories during it's existence.While not specifically recommended by a co-worker who has a PhD in WWII history, he thought it might be a good.It's definitely not the book I was hoping for. But, having said that, it is an exhaustive (and exhausting) history of the politicians and laws of Vichy France. For a historian it may be just what they hoped for, but not me. It was one of the driest and most unappealing books that I have read in the past decade.But I did read it all. Always hoping that it would deliver what I wanted. And, in a strange way, it did. It was the appendices (or notes) that actually gave me a glimpse in to why Vichy France existed and how people lived in it. So, perseverance paid off.
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This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the genesis and development of Vichy France during World War II. After the war, Vichy apologists tried to claim that the government was coerced by the German occupiers into their less palatable policies. Robert Paxton takes the revisionist line that, at least until 1942, Vichy frequently acted on its own initiative and Germany allowed it to do so, provided its own interests were not compromised. I found this book eye-opening background research for my novel in progress, set in occupied France.
—Vanessa Couchman
This seminal book first published in 1972 exploded the myth that Vichy was imposed by the Nazis in the face of massive French resistance. It also ignited public discussion of Vichy in France itself with Paxton being subsequently called as a witness in trials of former Vichy officials. Paxton describes how Vichy hoped to become an equal partner in the new Nazi German dominated Europe, while at the same time maintaining the fiction of neutrality. Vichy’s actions were in part motivated to save her fleet and her empire but when even these were lost at the end of 1942, Paxton shows how Vichy was motivated by fear of an allied invasion and a desire to become a broker in a future peace treaty.Vichy was never a fully signed up Fascist regime but a proponent of a mix of socially conservative, Catholic, agrarian, anti-Communist, anti-Anglo-Saxon and anti-Semitic ideologies. Despite this Vichy was domestically a technocratic regime with the same civil servants running the Vichy war economy later in charge of post war economic planning as if nothing had happened.Not a light read with plenty of detail and statistics but a serious historical classic.
—Michael Drysdale
