Robert Paxton

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Robert Owen Paxton (born June 15, 1932 in Lexington , Virginia ) is an American historian. Until his retirement he was Professor of History at Columbia University , New York . Paxton emerged primarily with works on the history of the French right in the interwar period , on the Vichy regime and on the concept of fascism .

academic career

Paxton graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1954 with a BA, then studied with a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University and received an MA there in 1963, he received his doctorate from Harvard University with a thesis on the relationship between the French officer corps and the Vichy regime. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before moving to Columbia University in 1969. In 1997 he retired there.

In 1997, Paxton appeared alongside some French historians, including Jean-Pierre Azéma and René Rémond , as an expert witness in the trial of Maurice Papon . In 1981 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2009 he was awarded the Legion d'honneur for his work on French history .

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Paxton's study on Vichy ( Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 , New York 1972) was also published in France in 1973 and caused a bitter argument there, the dimensions of which are comparable to the German Fischer controversy ( révolution paxtonienne ). Although he had to rely heavily on German documents in American archives because of the very limited archive access in France at the time, Paxton convincingly destroyed the post-war myth established by Robert Aron , among others , that the collaboration regime primarily tried to protect the French people from the attacks to protect the occupying power and avoided all German attempts to deepen the supposedly exclusively “forced” cooperation. He emphasized the importance of the pre-war French conflicts for Vichy and rejected the fixation on 1940. The war defeat merely gave the French right the long-awaited (and self-confidently seized) opportunity to rebuild the state and society according to their ideas, which were directed against the republican left and “1789”. The leeway allowed by the occupiers was considerable. Despite the furious attacks on the book (and the author) initially led by conservative French historians, journalists, and politicians, it is now widely recognized in France as a groundbreaking classic.

The work Vichy et les juifs , presented in 1981 (together with the Canadian historian Michael Marrus ), was a pioneering study. In it, Paxton and Marrus reject the idea that Vichy's measures, which were directed against French Jews and began with the “Jewish Statute” of October 3, 1940, were essentially enforced by the occupying power and, where possible, hindered by a reluctant bureaucracy. Instead, they emphasize the role of political anti-Semitism in France and specifically the escalation of anti-Semitism by the political right in the 1930s.

In 2004 Paxton published a systematic work on fascism (German: Anatomie des Faschismus , Munich 2006), which he has since refined in several essays. Paxton is one of the historians - by no means rare in English-language research - who accept the category of fascism as a defining generic term and include the Nazi regime in it . According to Paxton, the persistent rejection of the concept of fascism for National Socialism by significant parts of the scientific community is primarily a German (and to a lesser extent and for other reasons also Italian) phenomenon. In Anatomy of Fascism , Paxton sets himself the task of deriving the concept of fascism from the practice of the regimes and movements, but not from their ceremonies, rhetoric and budget. He thus clearly distinguishes himself from authors such as Stanley G. Payne , Roger Griffin and Emilio Gentile , who based their typologies of fascism on ideologies and programs. Programs and doctrines, however, according to Paxton, always played an instrumental role with the fascists and in no way comparable to the program debates of the socialists. The adaptation of the respective “doctrine” to the tactical needs of the moment, with a specifically fascist indifference to reason and intellect, is well documented.

The totalitarianism -term, to have included, among others, Griffin and Gentile into their models, Paxton also refuses. It is scientifically problematic and contradicting itself; some influential theorists of totalitarianism would exclude Italian fascism , the only regime that has ever claimed to be “totalitarian”, from their typology. If one argues that no real “total” control of society has been achieved in Italy, then the Nazi regime must also be declared non-totalitarian, because the Nazis, as all recent research shows, did not succeed in this either. In order to be able to equate the Soviet Union of Stalin and Nazi Germany, the totalitarianism theory would ignore fundamental differences in the historical genesis and political goals of both dictatorships and instead emphasize the similarity of the coercive and repressive apparatuses: "A camp is a camp." Such is the cooperation with conservative elites always and everywhere the basis of the fascist regimes, none of which - despite the pronounced "revolutionary" rhetoric - came about through a revolutionary break. That cannot be said of either the Soviet Union or the other socialist states and is deliberately ignored or at least overlooked by the theory of totalitarianism.

Paxton also accuses the theory of totalitarianism, like other currents of research, of a problematic concentration on the respective man at the top:

“The idea of ​​an all-powerful dictator personalizes fascism and creates the false impression that we can fully understand it just looking at its respective leaders. This image, the power of which is still felt today, is the last triumph of fascist propaganda. It provides an alibi to the nations who approved or tolerated fascist leaders and diverts attention away from the people, groups and institutions who helped them do so. "

For Paxton, fascism - unlike conservatism, liberalism and socialism - is an innovation of the 20th century, it "remained unthought until the 1890s." Fascism embodies a political combination that Friedrich Engels , for example , could not have imagined: "A dictatorship against the left with the enthusiastic approval of the population."

Paxton broadly defines fascism as follows:

“Fascism can be defined as a form of political behavior that is characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with the decline, humiliation or victim role of a community and by compensatory cults of unity, strength and purity, whereby a mass-based party of determined nationalist activists is more uncomfortable but effective Cooperation with the traditional elite gives up democratic freedoms and pursues goals of internal cleansing and external expansion by means of a force that is transfigured as redeeming and without ethical or legal restrictions. "

Paxton classifies and examines the various fascisms on the basis of a historical-empirical stage model: emergence, roots in the political system, reaching for power, exercising power, and finally development with the perspective of radicalization or stagnation, regression and decline.

“Most fascisms came to a standstill somewhere, went backwards, and sometimes features of different stages were preserved at the same time. While the seeds of fascist movements germinated in most modern societies by the beginning of the twentieth century, few eventually had fascist regimes as well. And only in Nazi Germany did a fascist regime reach the extreme horizons of radicalization. "

According to Paxton, the political and social context of a country ultimately decided the "trajectory" of a fascist movement. France was the first country with a specific and long flourishing fascist "intellectual creativity", but the fascist organizations remained meager. Oswald Mosley was the most intelligent and capable fascist leader after Paxton, but failed in an unfavorable political environment.

Paxton rejects the view that “there could no longer be fascism like in Europe between the world wars after 1945”. In the embryonic, early form, fascism also exists in the present. An "authentic popular American fascism" is not unthinkable: "We haven't heard of fascism for the last time - maybe the word, but not the thing."

Publications (selection)

  • The Anatomy of Fascism , New York: Knopf 2004.
  • Le Temps des Chemises Vertes: révoltes paysannes et fascisme rural 1929-1939 . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1996.
    • French Peasant Fascism: Henri Dorgères' Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929–1939 , Oxford University Press 1997.
  • with Michael Marrus : Vichy France and the Jews , Basic Books 1981.
  • Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 , London: Barrie and Jenkins 1972.
  • Parades and Politics at Vichy: the french officer corps under Marshal Pétain , Princeton University Press 1966.
  • Europe in the twentieth century , Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1975, 5th edition with Judith Hessler 2012.
  • Fascism as a manifestation of totalitarianism? . Pre-print from the Anatomy of Fascism in the Berlin Tagesspiegel from September 12, 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. See Paxton, Robert O., Comparisons and Definitions, in: Bosworth, Richard JB (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Oxford 2010, pp. 547-565, pp. 549.
  2. See Paxton, Robert O., Anatomie des Faschismus, Munich 2006, p. 30.
  3. ^ For a summary, see Paxton, Comparisons and Definitions, p. 562.
  4. See Paxton, Anatomie, pp. 40, 143.
  5. "The totalitarianism concept makes for bad history in other ways: it reinforces the myth of the all-powerful ruler, ignores the rulers complicated relations with social groups and civil society, and offers the elites a handy alibi." Paxton, Comparisons and Definitions , P. 562.
  6. ^ Paxton, Anatomie, pp. 19f.
  7. ^ Paxton, Anatomie, p. 11.
  8. ^ Paxton, Anatomie, p. 319.
  9. ^ Paxton, Anatomie, p. 41.
  10. ^ Paxton, Anatomie, p. 253.
  11. ^ Paxton, Anatomie, p. 255.
  12. ^ Paxton, Comparisons and Definitions, p. 565.