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.
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.
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.
[4] 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.
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.
[6] 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.
[6] 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.
[13]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).
The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy progressed through all five: 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.
[18]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.