The greatest emotion was seen at railway stations as men travelling to their regiments said goodbye to their mothers, fathers, wives and children. Station buffets now operated with self-service, a new phenomenon, as most waiters had been called up; there were also Red Cross workers doling out milk and dry bread to children, while Boy Scouts tried to help refugees with luggage. Although actual fighting still seemed distant to those in Paris, in reality there was nothing at all phoney about the next few months as far as Hitler and his generals were concerned; the Germans were training reservists and rushing equipment to the various fronts while the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939, still being digested with horror by the Allies, as well as by many European communists, neutralized the possibility of Germany being attacked in the east.
Since 1933, when Hitler had come to power and introduced laws preventing Jews and others from leading normal lives, refugees from Germany, Austria and eastern Europe had been escaping in whatever way they could to find work or a home. Many trusted that in France at least, the first country in Europe to emancipate its Jewish population, they would find refuge. But alongside the longstanding revolutionary ideals and declarations of human rights which underpinned French philosophical thinking, the country had had a long history of anti-Semitism which had never entirely disappeared and which, from time to time, flared up angrily. The Dreyfus affair, which lasted approximately from 1894 to 1904, had left deep-rooted scars in France and, even though anti-Semitism subsided in the 1920s – partly because it was hard to accuse Jews of not being patriotic when so many had given their lives fighting for France in the First World War – it revived again in the 1930s. This time it was fuelled by the renewed influx of foreign Jews fleeing the Nazis, which came on top of the earlier wave of immigration of mostly poor Jews from the east escaping pogroms at the beginning of the century. In 1936 France had its first Jewish Prime Minister, Léon Blum, serving at the head of a Popular Front coalition. Blum introduced several important social reforms, including paid holidays for workers, and he was also (to an extent) a champion of women’s rights. But although three women served in his cabinet, women in France still did not have the vote, nor the right to have a bank account in their own name. Blum’s tenure in office was short-lived and he resigned in 1937, unable successfully to tackle the country’s economic problems. The anti-Semitic far right, not afraid to brandish the slogan ‘Better Hitler than Blum’, was now able to win over elements of mainstream conservatives and socialists not previously associated with anti-Semitism, denouncing the alleged Jewish influence which, they argued, was not only pushing France into a war against Germany, against the country’s best interests, but also allowing the country to become ‘the dump bin of Europe’.
At the beginning of the war the number of Jews in France was approximately 330,000 compared with 150,000 in the interwar period. In Paris alone the number had risen from some 75,000 before 1914 to 150,000 in the 1930s. This increase fed the latent anti-Semitism in France and helped stimulate the growth of a right-wing fascist press. In addition to the Catholic and royalist Action Fran?aise of Charles Maurras (who led a movement of the same name), the three main journals were the weekly Gringoire, edited by Horace de Carbuccia, Candide and Je suis partout, the latter being the most openly anti-Semitic of all. By the end of 1936 the circulation of Gringoire had risen dramatically from 640,000 at the beginning of the year to 965,000. In February 1939, Je suis partout, where Robert Brasillach was editor in chief from 1937 to 1943, devoted an entire issue to an attack on Jewish doctors and medical students in France.