Graduate Student, History
Rose and Irving Crown Fellow
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Paul Jankowski
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About
I am a third-year Ph.D student in the department of history at Brandeis University studying 20th century French and European political and cultural history. My research interests include the Second World War and the Vichy regime, the early postwar period, war and society studies, civil-military relations, political anthropology and the history of memory. I hold a BA in European history with High Honors from Wesleyan University and an MA in history from Brandeis University.
A brief abstract of a current article in progress, entitled "Veterans of the Army of Revanche: Vichysto-résistants in Postwar France"
In the years following France’s 1940 defeat by Nazi Germany, Marshal Pétain’s authoritarian regime at Vichy steadily surrendered its internal autonomy, industrial strength, and foreign policy to German interests. In response to these events, some right-wing nationalists and Pétainists organized resistance networks or took part in acts of resistance. These “Vichysto-résistants,” as Jean-Pierre Azéma has dubbed them, were trapped between De Gaulle in London and the Marshal whose government had proven unable to maintain France’s honor and independence.
This paper follows the postwar careers of three prominent Vichysto-résistants during roughly the first decade after the liberation of France (1944-1954). Confronted by a legal purge intended to remove those who had served Vichy from the public sphere, former Vichysto-résistants sought to publicize a resistance that had been compatible with loyalty to Pétain and adherence to aspects of Vichy’s political project. In defending themselves and one another, they called upon their identities as career soldiers and veterans, opposing their military backgrounds and values to what they viewed as the anarchic and factional Gaullist and Communist resistances. They sought to reconcile their traditional soldiering identities with new military and political realities that had emerged during the Second World War: partisan warfare, ideological conflict, the collapse of the state and the breakdown of the chain of command.
