I think the career of President Mitterrand, which was rather sensational when it was revealed, is probably very typical.

There were the events of 1968 when young people began to ask their parents, what did you do in the war? And since the middle- or late-'70s, the French have been absolutely obsessed with the Vichy regime. They have an institute of contemporary history that turns out first-rate scholarly work. Their textbooks are accurate. Whether the students actually read them is another matter.

Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides.

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Well, I think they're going to learn that an awful lot of French people changed their minds. In 1940, the Third Republic had made a miserable mess of it.

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

I think the career of President Mitterrand, which was rather sensational when it was revealed, is probably very typical.