Pierre Gaxotte

Gaxotte Pierre ( born November 19, 1895 in Revigny -sur- Ornain, Meuse, † November 21, 1982 in Paris) was a French historian and right-wing conservative journalist.

Life

Gaxotte was the son of a notary, the Lycée Henri IV in Paris visited and studied from 1917 History and Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. After graduating in 1920, he was first school teacher in Evreux and Paris, but found access to fairly intellectual circles about the publisher Artème Fayard. He became secretary of Charles Maurras for three years and went into journalism. 1924 to 1940 he was editor in chief of the weekly magazine Candide were published by Fayard, wrote for the magazine L' Action Française of Maurras and was also editor of Ric Rac et and 1930-1936 of Je suis partout the publisher Fayard. Although Gaxotte sympathized with the far right, but saw a threat in France during the Nazi and alienated from his colleagues increasingly partout Je suis, where he was replaced in 1936 as editor of Brasil Robert Lach. During the occupation by the Germans, he was a follower of Marshal Pétain, but declined to collaboration. After the Second World War, he wrote for Le Figaro and supported the Nouvelle Droite.

He was known primarily for his historical works, particularly for his critical history of the French Revolution ( Gaxotte represented rather a monarchist position ), which first appeared in 1928. He also wrote works on Louis XIV, Louis XV. , He was trying to rehabilitate, Frederick the Great, a French and a German history. His German history, which begins with the sentence The history of Germany is that of an unhappy people, and in which he defended the thesis that the Germans would have been better off in a state of national disunity and their attempt at national unification would have brought only misery across Europe, was in France in 1963 show a bestseller.

Gaxotte 1953 member of the Académie française. 2007, a historian Prize was named after him.

Writings

• The French Revolution, Luebbe 1985 ( Nymphenburg Verlagshandlung 1949. Original French: La Révolution française, Fayard 1928; about arbeitee and verbeasserte Edition: Fayard, Paris 1962.