Johann Chapoutot
Johann Chapoutot is a French historian, specializing in contemporary history, Germany, and Nazism.
Early life
Johann Chapoutot was born in Martigues. In 1995, his eleventh grade history teacher enrolled him in the Concours Général in the history category, where the topic was "Was it one or several fascisms in interwar period Europe?". Chapoutot ranked first at the competition.He got his PhD in History in 2006 thanks to his thesis "National-Socialism and Antiquity"
Career
He was successively docent at Pierre Mendès-France University, at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and at Sorbonne University.In 2015, he criticized the choice to republish Mein Kampf as it would foster an outdated "Hitlero-centric" interpretation of Nazism.
Analyses
Johann Chapoutot theorizes that Nazism comes from a coherent and deeply-thought worldview where humanistic and universalistic values are rejected. The Nazi ideology sees the Germanic man as deeply corrupted by modern society and pulled away from its natural state. The German people must enact a "cultural revolution" in order to come back to their natural state, way of living and relationships with others. Nazism follows an organicistic interpretation of society : the individual only exists as a member of an ethnical group. That "cultural revolution" is rooted in a racialist interpretation of History where "race wars" shape cultures and politics, as such there is a need for "racial preservation" for the Aryan people, threatened biologically, morally and intellectually by other races. The Germanic race, lest it should disappear, must therefore distance itself from Christianity, The Enlightenment, and materialism. That revolution has to take place on both a collective and an individual spectrum.In 2014, Chapoutot published The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi, which was translated into English by Miranda Richmond Mouillot in 2018. According to this book, Nazi Germany was deeply rooted in European culture and history. As such Nazism merely an historical accident and must therefore be taken seriously for what it is. He argues that the Nazi ideology directly follows romanticism, particularly its appeal to a return to "the origin" and its disgust for the French Revolution.