dominated by conservative or pro-Communist thinking, neither of them very inclined to consider the grass-roots pro-democracy developments at liberation. There was little recognition in French scholarship on the active participation of the Vichy regime in the deportation of French Jews, until American political scientist Robert Paxton's 1972 book, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. The book received a French translation within a year and sold thousands of copies in France. In the words of French historian , the book "had the effect of a bombshell, because it showed, with supporting evidence, that the French state had participated in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi concentration camps, a fact that had been concealed by historians until then." The "Paxtonian revolution", as the French called it, had a profound effect on French historiography. In 1997, Paxton was called as an expert witness to testify about collaboration during the Vichy period, at the trial in France of Maurice Papon. Social and cultural Many were concerned with getting life back to the way it was, "a l'identique", as it was described, but leaders said that modernization was needed. As Jean Monnet said, "We have no choice. The only alternative to modernization is decadence." The question of what this would look like was not obvious, and was one of the core political issues, from liberation to Algerian independence. The Second World War had devastated the glittering art and literary effervescence of the Années folles in 1920s Paris, as well as the many Jewish, émigré and refugee artists and writers who had formed the School of Paris between the two world wars. Marc Chagall escaped to safety in the US with the help of American journalist Varian Fry, but he was one of the lucky, and while he eventually returned to France, he never went back to Paris. The poet Max Jacob on the other hand had died of pneumonia in the camp at Drancy, and Chaïm Soutine died of a bleeding ulcer died while hiding from the Nazis in Paris. After the liberation of France, artists and writers returned, but for the most part they were other artists who made another kind of art. Their themes were no longer color, surrealism and Dada, but mirrored the industrialization of France in their exploration of abstract geometry and the influence of Rothko. Existentialist writers expressed absurdity not as a riot of surrealism but instead