"They took particular interest in the revelations that emerged in 19333-34 about the shady dealings of Serge Alexandre Stavinsky, a Russian of Jewish origins who manipulated his connections with governmental figures for his personal gain. The Stavinsky Affair, as it was called, brought thousands of Frenchmen into the streets of Paris on February 6, 1934 to riot against democracy and the corruption it had allegedly brought to the French polity. Stavisky became a powerful representation of the Jew as foreigner, swindler, and shady wheeler-dealer."

Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p.147

"When Léon Blum became France's first Jewish premier in 1936, at the head of a Popular Front government of socialists and communists, antisemitic rhetoric increasingly passed from the streets to the Chamber of Deputies and the General Council of the Seine. In the former, Xavier Valat, a deputy of the Right who later achieved notoreity as the head of Vichy's Commissariat-Général aux questions juives, rose to deplore the day when "for the first time this old Gallo-Roman country would be governed . . . by a Jew."

Ibid., p.148

"Moreover, Blum was unabashedly and publically proud of his Jewishness, which he felt to be a source of his socialist commitments and in no way in conflict with his French culture."

Ibid.

Yeah its not like your average Frenchman is a rabid leftwing socialist or anything...