Career
Paxton is best known for his book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (1972), in which he argued that collaboration with Nazi Germany was voluntarily entered into by the Vichy government, and not forced upon it by German pressure. It is considered one of the path-breaking works on France in the Vichy era. Its thesis has earned respect among both American and French historians.
Paxton was the co-writer of Claude Chabrol's film, The Eye of Vichy.
Paxton has put forward a definition of 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."
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)