When Paxton invented Vichy

Robert O.Paxton, Virginian origin, arrived in Paris in 1960, the same year as Beate Klasfeld. One and the other will revise the memory found in libraries. Paxton, who has encountered the same banned Paris that French historians, operates the German archives, made wars of microfilmed and kept Americans in Washington.

From his reading, Paxton has a version of the 40-44 period that challenges the theory of "shield" that showed Marshal Pétain and his team practicing passive resistance and anxious not to lose touch with America, while the active collaboration was the fact of Pierre Laval. His book is acceuilli as a breakthrough by historians. In 1997, the second edition of Vichy France, reviewed by Henry Rousso, Patrick Weil and Michel Winock, is treated with the respect accorded to the monuments. Paxton then explains the meaning of his work in a new preface: it was to ruin the assumptions on which was based the thesis of Robert Aron and particularly the idea of ​​"shield" to assume he was a Petain interposing its prestigious "winner Verdun "between arriving, many, predatory and brutal (the" diktat "according Paxton) and the French occupied.

Paxton questioned. Saying rely on "twenty-five years of research in French and German archives," he said in 1997 that "far from playing a double game with the Allies, was fighting Vichy with them to defend its neutrality with more vigor face Germans: the book demonstrates that the primary objective of Vichy has always been to find a third way, that of neutral state in Hitler's Europe, and then, when the defeat of Germany entered the field as possible, the an arbitrator between the two sides. "
Some objected that this also emerged clearly from the 1973 version, it does not matter, it is the conclusion reached by the historian from 1997 in a new environment.

In 1997, therefore, the author of Vichy France conducted a comfortable career and he is now an honorary doctorate from the University of Caen; he has behind him twenty-five years of research he boasts, in an area that not only plowed but "revolutionized". Marc Ferro has only scratched his Petain about the "Polonization" Paxton feared that refuses to believe. And massacres of Oradour d'Ascq, Glières and Tulle, Ferro request?
The reissue of his book in 1997, with its garland thanked French historians, shows how its jurisdiction is recognized and this is a feature that comes October 31, 1997 at the Bordeaux court to resume the themes of Vichy France.
This leads him to repeat the figure contained in the first editions, an astonishing figure on which readers and friends passed without correcting jump. In the context of the trial and used to charge against Papon, a representative of the Vichy admnistration (also resistant Gaullist), it takes a scope and a new resonance. This is one of the German troops occupying Paxton fixed at 40 000 men. They were enough, he said to overawe the forty million French conquered!
At the bar, it takes the data stressing that the number of Germans present in France from 1940 to 1944 is crucial in understanding the policy of collaboration.
This proves that in a country where German troops are practically absent, the dirty work was the fact occupied themselves ...

In reality, everything indicates that the German occupation troops were never been less than 250 000 men. In December 1941 an instruction of Hitler, recommends maintaining strong in anticipation of the operation Attila (the invasion of the southern zone). The local garrison Dieppe rejects the sea in 1942 the commando of 5000 Canadians recognize that Churchill sends lieux.En 1944, while the STO spawned the bush, everyone seems to agree on the figure of one million weapon Germans, and the commander of the Western Front, Rundstedt, which it considers insufficient, claims it is brought to one million and a half, or a little more than 150 reinforcement men Paxton mentions in Bordeaux ...
One historian of the period, Pierre Laborie, a professor at the University of Toulouse, disputes the paxtoniennes statistics. In a lecture in Lyon in October 2006, he mentions the figure of "40,000" ("old") found in a 2005 edition of Vichy France and it falls another of his assertions that: "The forces new arrivals would be later and they would have been placed on the coasts ", commenting on the way:" This is a big mistake, because embarrassing comments that accompany it, and unfortunately repeated in the editions, despite requests made to draw the attention of the editor on the blunder. "
The blunder was there as fraternal, that is gross errors which he is now question because an incorrect number held for thirty years and uttered the assizes can not be a blunder is a blunder so coarse that it betrays ignorance of the subject.
Pierre Laborie then produced a series of numbers for correct Paxton and it leads to this very measured conclusions: "It is regrettable that the legitimate respect for the great historian of Vichy lead to remain silent before a questionable point of his work and to give it a kind of status of "sacred cow" that he certainly never claimed. "
Everyone can know today that the "Paxtonian Revolution" was based on statistical data to the limit of the absurd. Anyone who, without anyone asking him anything, just detailing his fantasies to the court's bar can only blame himself if they put at risk its construction.
In fact, the German Diktat has been strong and constant even if the "Polonization" dreaded which remind Laval does not occur. Arrests, torture, shootings, hostage Petain is offering to save the hostages from Abetz pistol in hand to reclaim Laval Hotel du Parc, the irruption of troops in Toulon to enter the fleet, all that has existed, German pressure was strong and constant.

Paxton is naked and those who methodically cover the internet do not prevent that his book has lost most of his probationary virtue. We must resume the history of Vichy where Robert had left Aron, without neglecting the assumptions and documents produced by the new historians but by integrating the data provided by the French finally open all archives and not cleaned.
By expanding course perspective. Born in 1856, the only Petain witnessed two losses (1870 and 1940) which gave the field to his vision of history. His search for neutrality and mediating position of the great conflict that he would like to keep are part of the long term, with the Franco-German reconciliation after the war.
The attempt to work under the Armistice, in the unspoilt military neutrality served to keep a country in working order: high school, universities, colleges, publishing, corporate bodies, aeronautical, automotive, without forgetting the Lacq gas discovered and hidden from the Germans or the Joliot-Curie Research leading to the strike force. Do not forget about all kinds of reforms that are reflected in the current institutions.
We must beware of the idea of ​​original sin. In fact morality, nations have survie.Tout than the occupied country collaborating and resists. And when in 1944 he seeks to transmit its powers to de Gaulle, his dissenting disciple. Petain bows to the gambler happy, knowing that he will exercise power in the spirit if not the same style as his, he who has never played the fate of the country on a single map.