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.
“A small masterpiece of objectivity and serenity,” the writer Emmanuel Todd called Mr. Azéma’s work in a review in Le Monde, using terms that suggested the passions that Vichy continued to arouse in France in the late 1970s — a time when Marcel Ophuls’s landmark documentary about wartime France, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” was still banned from French public television.
Mr. Azéma’s book “quickly became the standard reference on the subject,” the historian Henry Rousso wrote in “La Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours” (1987, translated in 1991 as “The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944”).
In a tribute to Mr. Azéma after his death, France’s minister of culture, Rachida Dati, said he “leaves behind him the work of a great historian and the memory of a great professor.” In his latter years Mr. Azéma was the historical consultant for the popular French television series “Un Village Français” (“A French Village”), set during the German occupation.
His stance as a historian deeply critical of Vichy was all the more remarkable in that Mr. Azéma’s father, the poet and journalist Jean-Henri Azéma, had been a leading light of the Paris collaborators during the war, writing for the pro-Nazi newspapers “Je Suis Partout” and “Gringoire,” producing antisemitic screeds and broadcasting propaganda for the Vichy regime on Radio Paris.
In the family’s grand Left Bank apartment in the 14th arrondissement, his parents “had a lot of parties,” Mr. Azéma recalled in an interview with the newspaper La Croix in 2012. “I saw the whole cream of the collaborationist crop on parade.”
With the Allied invasion of France in June 1944, Jean-Henri Azéma plunged in further, joining the Waffen-SS and donning the Nazi uniform. After Germany’s defeat, he escaped first to Switzerland and then took the so-called “Ratline” to Argentina, living out his days in Buenos Aires, where he founded a public relations agency. At his trial in absentia for collaboration in 1948, his wife, Mr. Azéma’s mother, testified against him.
Mr. Azéma did not see his father for more than 20 years after the war. When he finally visited him in Buenos Aires in 1968, he found a man in late middle age “with a kind of faded elegance, the manners of a lordly type,” the magazine L’Histoire wrote in 1988 when it interviewed the younger Mr. Azéma.
“I didn’t choose this period to untangle my complicated family history,” he told La Croix, referring to the Vichy era. “But a certain Sigmund might certainly say that it counted for a lot.”
In fact, the father became a precious witness for the son, helping him understand more deeply the period that he had become obsessed with. After President Georges Pompidou granted Jean-Henri Azéma and other former collaborators amnesty in 1972, the elder Mr. Azéma would visit his son in France every year, Mr. Azéma’s daughter Ariane Azéma recalled in an interview.
“They talked endlessly,” she said, adding, “He treated his father like a witness.”
“Funny relationship,” she continued. “It wasn’t exactly filial — wasn’t a father-son relationship. It was a historian having a discussion with a witness.”
Mr. Azéma told L’Histoire in 1988, 12 years before his father died: “It was in talking, talking, talking that I understood better what might have motivated him. And that made the relationship healthier.”
He told the newsmagazine Nouvel Observateur in 2009 that he had used his father’s memory “to disentangle what was at stake in the internal struggles of these ultra-right-wing activists.”
In a short 1975 book, “La Collaboration,” Mr. Azéma didn’t discuss his father. But his judgment about the collaborators was unequivocal: “It seems to us evident that, globally, the Collaboration was a failure, that the Collaborationists were losers,” he wrote. “Above all because they piled up mistake upon mistake.”
Jean-Pierre Azéma was born in Paris on Sept. 30, 1937. With his parents in flight in the summer of 1944, Jean-Pierre, at 7 years old, and his two younger brothers were momentarily abandoned by both parents in Brussels when it was under Allied bombardment, he later recalled.
After the war, Jean-Pierre was turned over to his grandmother and enrolled in a series of boarding schools, where he recalled being cold and hungry much of the time. He began wearing the scarf that was to become his inseparable trademark in his teaching years, finished high school outside Paris at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, where he became friends with a future eminent historian, Michel Winock, and studied history at the Sorbonne under the medievalist Édouard Perroy.
A 1967 course on the Vichy regime at Sciences Po given by the historian René Rémond helped orient Mr. Azéma to that historical period. He returned there in 1973 as an assistant professor and received his doctorate under Mr. Rémond.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Azéma was one of the historians — Mr. Paxton was another — who were called as expert witnesses in the trial of the French civil servant Maurice Papon, who was convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for his role in the deportation of the Jews of Bordeaux to Nazi death camps.
Among Mr. Azéma’s final works were two devoted to major figures of the French resistance: Jean Moulin and Jean Cavaillès.
In addition to his daughter Ariane, Mr. Azéma is survived by his wife, Marie-France (Rucheton) Azéma; another daughter, Albine; a son, Gaspard; and seven grandchildren.
An active Socialist, he believed that “to know the past allowed one to be engaged politically,” his daughter Ariane said. At the same time, he was deeply suspicious of French politicians who instrumentalized the past for their political gain, a common practice in France.
“History doesn’t belong to any single person,” he told the television station France 3 in 2007, “not to historians, not to teachers.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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