Convergence

One approach to the problem of finding a `pedigree' for Vichy is offered by the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, author of a trilogy of books on fascism in France. Sternhell has argued that, far from being an alien graft on to French political cultuire, fascism's origins as a coalescence of the anti-liberal right and ant-liberal left date back to late nineteenth-century France. He goes on to argue that in the 1930s, fascist ideology, or at least a fascist sensibility, was permeating French politics, and that the Occupation can only be understood in this light. Sternhell has been criticised for being too imprecise in his definition of fascism, enrolling any critic of liberal drmmcracy under the banner of fascism. Nonetheless his work does reveal, more than previous historians had done, the existence of strong anti-liberal currents in French political culture, especially in the 1930s. The British historian Tony Judt, analysing the influence of communism on French intellectuals after 1945, has also emphasized the weaknesses of liberal ideas in France. Judt notes that several Communist intellectuals had started in the 1930s as ultra-conservatives: he explains their conversion by their consistent antipathy to liberal democracy.

Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944 (2001)