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New York Times
20-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Jean-Pierre Azéma, 87, Dies; Chronicled French Collaboration With Nazis
Jean-Pierre Azéma, a historian who became a leading chronicler of France's dark days of wartime compromise, helping lead a generation's shift in attitude about that period though he himself was the son of a notorious collaborator with the Nazis, died on July 14 in Paris. He was 87. His death, in a hospice, was announced by the university where he taught for more than 35 years, the Institut d'Études Politiques, popularly known as Sciences Po. With a series of dispassionate, carefully researched books beginning in the 1970s, Mr. Azéma became part of a group of younger historians who helped destroy the postwar myths that France had comforted itself with: that the collaborationist wartime Vichy regime had done what it could to resist the occupying Germans and to protect the French, and that its leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was essentially benevolent. Mr. Azéma was having none of it. 'A phony regime' is what he called Pétain's government in his best-known work, 'De Munich à la Libération, 1938-1944' (1979, and translated in 1984 as 'From Munich to the Liberation'). He condemned the government for its 'sententious moralism and anti-democratic élitism' and its 'defensive and inward-looking nationalism.' Vichy was 'basically authoritarian,' Mr. Azéma wrote, a careful judgment not then universally accepted. He became known for picking apart Vichy's various factions — from the believers in Pétain's cult to the opportunists, and from those who believed in the marshal's project of a 'National Revolution' to those who were pro-Nazi. In France, Mr. Azéma's book outsold even the groundbreaking work of his friend the Columbia historian Robert O. Paxton, 'Vichy France,' which Mr. Azéma's mother, Claude Bertrand, had translated into French six years before and which was the first to set off the revisionist tide. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
LeMonde
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- LeMonde
As World War II ended, the French Riviera became a 'GI's heaven'
Blues, pinks, reds… Multicolored sparks lit up the sky over Nice on the evening of July 4, 1945. Ten days before the traditional Bastille Day festivities, the city was celebrating on the Baie des Anges. The war already seemed far away, even though fighting had continued into the spring near the Italian border. Food was still scarce, reconstruction was slow to begin and the atmosphere remained heavy with purges and calls for vengeance, just as they did across France. Though perhaps more intensely in Nice, a city that in 1940 had inherited the grim nickname "Eldest Daughter of the National Revolution" from Philippe Pétain. But on this night of July 4, as firecrackers echoed, the mood along the Promenade des Anglais was relaxed. The famous seaside boulevard had not regained its former glory. Mines still littered parts of the coast, swimming was not entirely safe and bunkers still lined the beach – sometimes disguised with fake shopfronts painted by the Germans. As a result, sea bathing was not really part of daily life for "long-established Niçois, who were generally not very receptive to this semi-Baudelairean invitation," read a column in La Liberté de Nice et du Sud-Est. So, no swimming for the people of Nice, but the entertainment was still plentiful. One year after the city's liberation, on August 28, 1944, audiences at the Paris-Palace cinema applauded Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece The Great Dictator – "remarkable in every respect," according to one local critic. Next to the Rationing section, newspapers listed daily "Feasts and banquets." Bars and dance halls regained their clientele and enjoyed certain privileges that were not universally appreciated: "Since the Liberation, they have invested several tens of millions to renovate their establishments. (...) It seems to us that raw materials should go not to places of pleasure, but rather to schools, hospitals and workers' housing," lamented La Liberté de Nice et du Sud-Est.
