Prelude to Vichy: France and the Jewish Refugees in the Era of Appeasement

Abstract

A major component of the rising tide of xenophobia in the last years of the Third Republic was a particularly virulent strain of anti-semitism. Since the nineteenth century, French anti-semites had attacked the Jews as an unassimilable foreign element within the nation. By the late 1930s, however, the fact that France alone of the major western powers had retained an open-door immigration policy and as a result had become the haven for approximately three million foreigners of whom 50,000-60,000 were Jews added urgency to these anti-semitic polemics.' On the economic front, opponents of continued immigration pointed to the scarcity of jobs and the growing economic competition between foreigners and natives. In cultural terms, spokesmen favouring immigration restrictions invoked the spectre of an 'invasion' of France by foreigners which in time would destroy the fabric of French culture. Such an invasion appeared all the more insidious in light of the perennial preoccupation of Frenchmen with their country's low birthrate. Finally, opponents of immigration argued that the foreigners constituted a political menace to the French nation. At a time when the French government together with significant sectors of the French public pinned their hopes on the policy of appeasement, the growing presence on French soil of several thousands of political and religious refugees victims of nazi and fascist persecutions threatened to involve France in an undesired war. It was this perception that the refugees would work to undo the apparent accomplishment of appeasement which helped give anti-semitism, at least in its form of opposition to Jewish immigration, a currency which far exceeded the bounds of the radical right. Indeed, what most distinguished the anti-semitism of the late 1930s from its fin de siecle predecessor was less its ideology than the nature of its political support. Whereas French Jews had