Itinéraire d’un savant ambitieux. La carrière du physicien Jean Thibaud sous le régime de Vichy

Abstract

The “Vichy parenthesis” marked a turning point in the career of Jean Thibaud (1901-1960). He took over posts left vacant by the dismissals of Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin, two prominent figures in French physics whose political commitments were incompatible with the new regime. These posts taking were blamed by academics involved in the Resistance who saw Thibaud as a “collaborator”. We propose to follow Thibaud’s career path as closely as possible in the light of a personal “accommodation” strategy—a concept proposed by the historian Philippe Burrin to describe various forms of adaptation to the circumstances of the Occupation that we revisit in the context of this study.