Robert Paxton
| Robert Paxton | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Owen Paxton 1932 Lexington, Virginia |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Notable students | Sharon Traweek |
| Known for | Political scientist and historian |
| Influences | James Joll and John Roberts |
Robert Owen Paxton (born 1932) is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era.
Paxton was born in 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 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 1969. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997.
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. 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. 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).
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