French radicalism’s anti-Jewish streak arose from stalled industrialization and pre-capitalist socialism

Evidence

Behind these obvious and rather superficial incentives to anti-Jewish attitudes there was a deeper cause, which was crucial to the whole structure of the specifically French brand of radicalism, and which almost succeeded in turning the whole French leftist movement against the Jews. Bankers were much stronger in the French economy than in other capitalist countries, and France’s industrial development, after a brief rise during the reign of Napoleon III, lagged so far behind other nations that pre-capitalist socialist tendencies continued to exert considerable influence. The lower middle classes which in Germany and Austria became antisemitic only during the seventies and eighties, when they were already so desperate that they could be used for reactionary politics as well as for the new mob policies, had been antisemitic in France some fifty years earlier, when, with the help of the working class, they carried the revolution of 1848 to a brief victory. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 171

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows economic backwardness and pre-capitalist socialist ideology as causes of antisemitism among French radical left earlier than in Germany.
• XREF: connects to: French radicals opposed women’s suffrage out of fear women would vote conservatively — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 278