ABSTRACT
This chapter traces French press reactions to Kristallnacht and questions the relationship between these and the French public's attitudes toward the Nazi regime. The propaganda minister's emphasis on Britain and the United States is mirrored in international histories of this period, which have tended to overlook or downplay the importance of French reactions in favor of those of the Anglophone world. Berlin evidently felt that outraged sensibilities, French as well as Anglo-American, needed to be addressed. Historiographical trends have affected assessments of French reactions to Kristallnacht even as the topic itself has been granted rather scant attention. French newspapers could only hesitantly express the outrage felt by their readers because of their proximity to political power. Alan Steinweis notes, however, that 'the pogrom had been harshly condemned in the United States, Britain, and France'. Jean-Marc Dreyfus has described how Kristallnacht represented one final occasion for French diplomatic reports from Germany concerning the persecution of the Jews.
