Last month, I wrote a piece for this page questioning the merit of some cultural developments in France. One of those was the launch of an Arabic-language version of a largely government-funded news channel where I worked. The other was the sale of the Louvre name to developers in Abu Dhabi. My basic thesis was that some of these projects were questionable.

Unsurprisingly, there was a backlash. Mistaking criticism for disdain, French bloggers denounced the article to my employer. What happened next I won’t detail, but suffice it to say I no longer work at the channel.

Chauvinism is one thing, but intolerance of difference is another. Why should any of this matter?

Here are two reasons: the first is that during the Nazi occupation of France, well over 70,000 Jews living in the country, among which some 11,000 were children, were systematically rounded up and deported to concentration camps — with the active collaboration of the French government and thanks, in part, to ordinary French citizens. Whether due to fearful compliance or active denunciation of their fellow citizens, the results speak for themselves.

Today, France is at the European vanguard of anti-Semitism, although no one cares to talk about it very much. The latest incident occurred on April 26: a 22-year-old Jewish woman in Marseille wearing a Hebrew chai pendant was attacked by two men who accused her of wearing “the sign of the devil.” They used a knife to cut off her shirt, used a felt tip pen to draw a swastika between her breasts, cut off a patch of her hair, threw her to the ground, and struck her several times with a motorcycle helmet.

The second reason that French intolerance matters is that France is just a few days away from an epochal presidential election. A smear campaign against the leading contender, the reform-minded Nicolas Sarkozy, is now in full swing. It’s one thing to be critical of a candidate’s policies, but the attempts by some on the Left to demonize Mr. Sarkozy are uniquely, even disturbingly, French. It all began when, as the minister of Interior, he made a politically incorrect speech in which he used the word “scum” to describe some of the residents of a poor Parisian suburb. Riots broke out afterward. Add to that a photo taken of Mr. Sarkozy with President Bush and his recurrent portrayal as the devil incarnate was sealed.

Smear campaigns can and do happen anywhere, and no one said politics was prettier on the other side of the Atlantic. But in France they can contain a particular venom.

Remember the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s? Some of the anti-Semitic invectives unleashed by Parisians during that incident to which Theodor Herzl was witness moved him to pen, “The Jewish State.” Sometimes even simple dissent has run up against the French uber-ego. After all, Victor Hugo had to flee the country after he spoke out against Napoleon III’s power grab in 1851. That free speech should be so ill-received in the country that brought us the bikini and so many big ideas is no cause for celebration.

Neither, for that matter, are statistics that indicated a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic acts in 2006. According to the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, there was a 45% increase in acts of physical aggression against individuals between 2005 and 2006.

It arguably matters less who is behind such acts than the political climate that allows them to happen. The extremes of the political spectrum in France always have had undercurrents of anti-Semitism. On the far right, there is the National Front and its aging but uppity leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, for whom the Holocaust was but a “detail” of World War II. On the left, there’s the Communist Revolutionary League, which not only boycotted a march to protest the murder of a young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, at which other political parties and anti-racism groups were present, but issued a press release to tell everyone about their boycott.

Politicians in the middle are quick to denounce acts of anti-Semitism, but sometimes the press trails behind. To cite but one example, there was a journalist from the newspaper Le Monde (which runs a condensed version of the New York Times in English) who, on national television, steadfastly refused to characterize the torture and killing of Halimi as anti-Semitic in nature. The fact that the alleged perpetrator went on record as having singled out the young man because “Jews have the money” was, apparently, for that reporter of limited relevance.

Perhaps any criticism of France starts to loom a bit large in the minds of Frenchmen who still believe their country is at the center stage of world affairs.

The sad thing is that too often France refuses to see itself as other nations do: as a beautiful country marred by generations of bickering — the French Revolution didn’t begin with a handshake, and certainly didn’t end with one — and where arrogance can surpass the heights of the French Alps in a heartbeat.

Mr. Sarkozy is the right man to start bringing French attitudes back to earth, but will enough people in France care to hear his message?

Mr. Grant edits the blog frenchminute.com.