Academic dignitaries have been howling indignantly ever since Trump won the presidency in 2016. We are supposedly headed toward full-blown fascism, according to such New York Review of Books luminaries as Timothy Snyder, Deborah Lipstadt, Jason Stanley, and, more recently, Robert O. Paxton. 

These, among other public intellectuals, have been noticing the Marks of the Beast on our Republican presidential candidate. Paxton, the leading American historian of Vichy France and a longtime Columbia University fixture (now in his nineties), did, however, take his time before affixing the F word to the Bad Orangeman. But already in May 2017 he was communicating his premonitions in Harpers:

It is powerfully tempting to call the new president of the United States a fascist. Donald Trump’s bullying tone, his scowl, and his jutting jaw recall Benito Mussolini’s absurd theatrics. His dramatic arrivals by plane (a public relations tactic pioneered by Adolf Hitler) and his excited dialogues with crowds chanting simple slogans (“U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” “Lock her up!”) recall Nazi rallies of the early 1930s. In his stump speeches, Trump is fond of deploring national decline, which he blames on foreigners and despised minorities; disdaining legal norms; condoning violence against dissenters; and rejecting anything that smacks of internationalism, whether it be trade, institutions, or existing treaties. All of these were fascist staples.

A key point I make in my 2021 book on antifascism (Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade) is that a persistent link can be found between the politics and scholarship of antifascist historians. Such a link would be hard to uncover in less politically engaged scholars, for example, Stanley Payne writing on Franco and the Spanish Civil War, Herbert Butterfield looking at medieval science, or Jonathan Clark examining English concepts of kingship in the 18th century. One can even read historians of an earlier generation who were Communist Party members or who were very close to the party, like the classical historians Francis Cornford and M. I. Findley, without being belabored with tiresome leftist politics.

What we are seeing in historiography reflects the total politicization of our culture. In the 1950s, movie script writers with Communist sympathies, such as Dalton Trumbo and Dashiell Hammett, could produce, at least on the surface, nonideological films. Though the contemporary historian Sean McMeekin has shown in Chronicles how fraught with pro-Soviet propaganda was the classic movie Casablanca (“Big Screen Bolshevism,” December 2021 Chronicles), the signs of Communist sympathy in this flick were not at first clear to me. Movies 70 years ago were generally far more subtle in their political messaging than what has replaced them.

Now, my TV screen showers me with nonstop ideological indoctrination. Each time I turn on my set, I can behold young blacks with dreadlocks depicted as Russian aristocrats or courtiers of Mary Queen of Scots, never-ending films and documentaries celebrating gayness and nonbinary identities, and nasty depictions of white Christian fanatics. One obvious difference between the cultural left in the 1950s and its contemporary counterpart is that the pro-Communist sympathies that the left used to peddle had far fewer takers than our contemporary woke left. 

An antifascist subscript also now runs through our authorized historiography. Although such history writing is described as revisionist, what is more noticeable is its appeal to guilt. Such works exist supposedly to set the record straight about something that earlier generations of historians allegedly ignored or, even worse, willfully suppressed because of their reactionary politics. 

Because of our now supposedly greater honesty and willingness to overcome past taboos, we are made to believe that antifascist historians are revealing long-hidden salvific truths. And by immersing ourselves in their revisionist studies (which, of course, are not really revisionist but reflect our hegemonic leftist ideology), we can cleanse ourselves of our inveterate sins, for example, having heretofore believed in rightist and even fascist accounts of the past. Once we’ve passed through this immersion in “penitential historiography,” we can become antifascists in good standing and possibly equipped to teach others according to the new canon. 

In this historiography, there are predictable villains, that is, racists, sexists, homophobes, Christian bigots, raging anti-Semites—in a word, wicked fascist or fascist-leaning actors. Arrayed against them are always the forces of light, Communists, radical secularists, and people who seem to prefigure our contemporary left. Because these earlier progressives were such pillars of virtue, we’re obliged to ignore or minimize those atrocities they committed, for instance, the misdeeds of the Spanish Republican side that went into a murder spree after 1931 or the antifascists who committed all kinds of butchery against their political opponents during the “cleansings” that Communist-led resistances carried out in France and Italy in 1944 and 1945.

A very detailed account of what happened in France can be found in the Histoire de l’épuration (History of the Purge), published in 1969 by Robert Aron, a French Jewish historian and close friend of Charles de Gaulle. Aron maintains that about 50,000 opponents of the Communists were murdered in the post-occupation bloodbath. Aron also underlines that the French Communist Party was deeply complicit in France’s defeat by Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940. At that time, the Soviet regime, from which French Communist leaders took marching orders, was fatefully in alliance with Nazi Germany. The French Communists switched sides in March 1941 when Hitler turned against his Soviet allies by invading Russia. Thereafter, the Communists used their position in the French Resistance to go after their enemies, something that the Italian Communists did almost as brutally. 

Aron also wrote what was once the authoritative history of the Vichy regime, the government set up by those French leaders who surrendered to Nazi Germany and then perforce accepted its control. Aron was clearly on the anti-Nazi side during these events, as a publicist for de Gaulle and the Free French government first in Brazzaville in the French Congo and later in London. For decades, his examination of the Vichy occupation government struck readers as balanced and highly informative. My far-from-right-wing graduate professors recommended his book on Vichy and I later purchased and devoured the French edition of his history of the resistance.

Wikipedia informs us that Robert Paxton’s Vichy: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 replaced Aron’s putatively dated scholarship starting in the 1970s. The reason for this replacement should be crystal clear, as dissenting French historian Jean-Marc Berlière points out in a timely critique of the French version of penitential historiography: Paxton’s monumental achievement was to make the Vichy regime “the principal actor in the deportation of Jews under the Nazi occupation and to remove the responsibility from the German Nazi command who gave the orders.”

Apparently, Aron and those of his school were (let’s not mince words!) ideologically deficient antifascists. They complained too much about the murders committed by the Communists in the internal French resistance, and they dared to notice that almost three-quarters of the Jewish population in France (and about 90 percent of the indigenous French Jews) survived both deportation and death in Nazi extermination camps.

No sane person would deny the Vichy government, and such leaders as onetime military commander Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval passed glaringly anti-Jewish legislation. In October 1940, for example, the Vichy government enacted laws barring Jews from the public sector and reducing their presence in French universities. The following year, the regime further attempted to appease the German command by interning foreign Jews who had fled to France to escape Nazi control. But the French collaborationist government, as explained by such Holocaust experts as Léon Poliakov and Raul Hilberg, went out of its way to protect indigenous French Jews. 

A higher percentage of Jews were saved by a clearly anti-Semitic French government than happened in Holland, Belgium, or Poland. That may have been partly because the German occupation made more systematic attempts to round up and deport Jews in other countries. But this may have also been the case, according to both Aron and Berlière, because the French collaborationist government showed an occasionally independent spirit. When a patriotic French political leader (and Algerian Jew), Eric Zemmour, recently made this self-evident observation, he was roundly denounced by the French media and all bien-pensant academic historians. Jewish civic groups, which are mostly on the cultural and social left in France, did all they could to distance themselves from Zemmour’s observation. 

The most often cited example of French Vichy collaboration with German occupation forces was the roundup of as many as 28,000 Jews for the purpose of deportation. That took place on July 16 and 17, 1942 in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a large winter sports center in Paris. Most of these detainees were eventually loaded onto trains and sent eastward to perish in Nazi extermination camps. French presidents from Jacques Chirac down to Emmanuel Macron have commemorated these deportations with special anniversary ceremonies. These somber events have been held at various spots from where the Jewish victims were sent east to perish. In July 2022, Macron gave a characteristically contrite speech, full of expressions of collective guilt, at Pithiviers, which, like Drancy, was one of the towns from where foreign Jews were deported after the roundup at the Vélodrome.

As Berlière correctly explains, these speeches can only make historical sense if one accepts the revisionist history of Paxton and of those influential French publicists who embrace his interpretations. From Chirac’s presidency onward, Frenchmen have been given the same message, which Macron ritualistically repeated in 2022: 

These black hours tarnish forever our history. France on that day did what is irreparable. … Not a single German soldier took part in the roundup. Everything proceeded from the will of a politics rendered gangrenous by anti-Semitism initiated in July 1940 and whose roots penetrate into those decades of our history that preceded it.”

Macron’s penitential speech, inspired by antifascist, leftist historians, actually muddles our understanding of the past. The French who rounded up foreign Jews in July 1942 were acting under orders from the SS command and its associated Judenreferat (Jewish Bureau). The general secretary of the national police, René Bousquet, who turned out to be a double agent, dickered with the German SS command in Paris but was told that the Germans would requisition the French police to arrest even the native French Jews if Bousquet wouldn’t cooperate. At that time, the Germans held 1.8 million French soldiers as war prisoners, and these hostages were periodically used to blackmail the collaborationist government.

Confusing the historical record even more are the statements of French politicians who leftist revisionist historian and journalists have been browbeaten into claiming the Vichy government was “the French state.” Vichy France was divided into two areas: one (including Paris) was directly occupied by the Germans; another area was held more directly under Pétain but still lay under the thumb of the conquerors. There was also a Free French movement and regime in exile, which claimed to be the true French government that had never surrendered to Hitler’s armies.

It has been decided in recent decades to make the present French government a continuation of the Vichy government. That way, French citizens can go on atoning for something that neither they nor their ancestors did or should be held accountable for. 

According to Berlière, de Gaulle’s France has faded away in the relevant antifascist narrative since it has been decided in recent decades to make the present French government a continuation of the Vichy government. That way, French citizens can go on atoning for something that neither they nor their ancestors did or should be held accountable for. 

That, we might observe, is entirely in keeping with penitential history, which always aims at destroying national pride in Western Christian countries. Once this guilt trip is laid on Western nations, its citizens are called on to expiate forever their genocidal pasts. Meanwhile, like the hopelessly brainwashed Germans, who look for fascists under their beds and pass hate-speech laws ad nauseam, other Western nations will keep their subjects from expressing illicit thoughts.

If the leftist French historian Henry Rousso calls the “Vichy Syndrome” “a past that has not passed,” the reason may not be the one Rousso gives. Frenchmen have not been convulsed with guilt for generations because of their participation in the Holocaust. They have been driven by an all-powerful left into confessing guilt for something that only a small minority of their population was ever involved in. Meanwhile, no Frenchman is expected to feel guilty about the utterly shameful record of French Communists in murdering many thousands of their political opponents during and after the German occupation. Antifascist history has turned the page on that, together with French Communist collaboration with Nazi Germany in 1940.  

A final observation: Among the most outspoken opponents of the regnant politically correct interpretation of Vichy France have been, to their credit, dissenting French Jews. Besides Zemmour, we should list the conservative rabbi Alain Michel, whose 2012 book Vichy et la Shoah (Vichy and the Holocaust) has excited the fury of the leftist French establishment. Like Zemmour, Michel points to the overwhelming evidence that the Vichy government intended to save indigenous French Jews and that Minster of State Pierre Laval, who was executed as a traitor during the Purge, played a key role in that operation. Kudos also go to Élisabeth Lévy, the Jewish editor of the website Causeur, who has provided scholars like Michel and Berlière with a needed voice. Such people, who have braved the usual antifascist attacks, have dared to tell us the historical truth.