Historian Jean-Pierre Azéma, "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 July 14, the New York Times reported. He was 87. His death was announced by the the Institut d'Études Politiques, where he taught for more than 35 years.
Beginning in the 1970s, Azéma was 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," the Times wrote.
Rachida Dati, France's minister of culture, paid tribute to Azéma, saying he "leaves behind him the work of a great historian and the memory of a great professor."
In his best-known work, De Munich à la Libération, 1938-1944 (1979; translated in 1984 as From Munich to the Liberation), Azéma condemned the government for its "sententious moralism and anti-democratic élitism" and its "defensive and inward-looking nationalism." The book "quickly became the standard reference on the subject," historian Henry Rousso wrote in Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours (1987, translated in 1991 as The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944).
Azéma's other books include Jean Moulin: le politique, le rebelle, le résistant (2003); Vichy: 1940–1944 (2000, with Olivier Wieviorka); 1938–1948: les années de tourmente: de Munich à Prague: dictionnaire critique (1995, with François Bédarida); Les libérations de la France (1993, with Olivier Wieviorka); La France des années noires (1993, with François Bédarida); and Le régime de Vichy et les Français (1992, with François Bédarida).
Azéma was also the historical consultant for the popular French television series Un Village Français (A French Village), set during the German occupation.
The historian's stance as a critic of Vichy was notable given that his father, poet and journalist Jean-Henri Azéma, "had been a leading light of the Paris collaborators during the war," the Times noted. In the family's grand Left Bank apartment, his parents "had a lot of parties. I saw the whole cream of the collaborationist crop on parade," Jean-Pierre Azéma recalled in an interview with the newspaper La Croix in 2012.
His father fled to Argentina after Germany's defeat, and Azéma did not see him for more than 20 years after the war before finally visiting him in Buenos Aires in 1968. Ultimately, "the father became a precious witness for the son, helping him understand more deeply the period that he had become obsessed with," the Times wrote.
"I didn't choose this period to untangle my complicated family history," he told La Croix about the focus of his work. "But a certain Sigmund might certainly say that it counted for a lot."
In his book La Collaboration (1975), Azéma wrote: "It seems to us evident that, globally, the Collaboration was a failure, that the Collaborationists were losers. Above all because they piled up mistake upon mistake."