Well, for starters there was a fair deal of anti-Semitism in France (especially by modern standards) before Vichy. Rather (in)famously, for example, Xavier Vallat, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, at his 1947 collaboration trial, defended his actions by claiming that he ALWAYS was an anti-Semite, that his anti-Semitism was authentically French and therefore the policies that were enacted under him could not be considered collaboration. In part, this shows that, even after the Liberation, anti-Semitism was considered a secondary crime (to that of collaboration, more specifically).

As a whole, while the Vichy regime was obviously anti-Semitic in general, it's rhetoric (and, to a certain extent, its policies) was not specifically anti-Semitic in the sense that it almost never specifically targeted the Jews in its propaganda, no speeches by Petain directly singled out (or even mentioned) the Jews, and so on. When the regime issues its first Jewish Statute in 1940, without direct German coercion, it does so in a very peculiar way, saying that the Vichy government "respects Jewish persons and property", and stressing that these measures (which limited Jews' ability to hold public office, as well as opening up pathways for deportation of foreign Jews, and the revocation of citizenship from some French Jews) were enacted due to "security needs". In part, this can be explained by the fact that the press in the Vichy France was already anti-Semitic enough so that there was little need for the government to push out campaigns of their own. Just to stress though, the Vichy government viewed French Jews as second-class citizens, and treated foreign Jews as an inconvenience whose fate they were largely indifferent to. But even people like Vallat still differed with the German anti-Semites in the sense that they tended to allow for a concept of a "good Jew", that is to say a French-citizen who is a Jew and had served France with distinction in the past, thereby proving his loyalty. And Vallat considered himself a "professional" anti-Semite. That said, practically, this did not amount to much as the Vichy regime handed out exemptions so rarely that it had little to no practical consequences for French Jews.

Now, I stress that this applied to Vichy France and not the Occupied Zone, which included Paris. The rhetoric in the Occupied Zone was virulently (and violently) anti-Semitic, both in terms of official propaganda, and the press.

In this context, I think it should be stressed that Vichy's anti-Semitism, while less radical than in Nazi Germany, was largely an autonomous policy that was rooted in France. Pétain’s entourage contained fanatical anti-Semites like Ménétrel and Alibert that were every bit as anti-Semitic as their German opposite numbers. That is to say, a lot of French anti-Semitism at the time was not a expression of complicity with the Nazis at all, but rather a home-grown phenomenon. The other matter is that the Vichy government certainly did nothing to dissuade people from actually expressing their anti-Semitic sentiments - upon the contrary, if anything it implicitly encouraged it. It did nothing to prevent anti-Semitism from spiraling into a very radical direction.

On the governmental side anti-Semitism was seen as a means of winning German favour - the same can be said in relation to the general populace, but not an insignificant amount of this was due to genuine anti-Semitic sentiments within a certain proportion of the French populace.

Hopefully this answers your question to some degree. There is a lot more that can be said on this topic, and I will try to answer any other related questions if you have any or if you feel that you didn't get an answer from what I wrote so far.

Good further reading:

• Julian Jackson, "France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944."

• John Sweets, "Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation."

• Adam Rayski, "The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance"

If you are interested, I would also recommend the following movies (I am warning you though - most, the French being French, are made to be rather very depressing) on the topic, most are feature films unless stated otherwise (all in French with English subtitles):

• "Lacombe Lucien" - on individual collaboration

• "The Sorrow and the Pity" (two parts) - a documentary

• "Au Revoir les enfants" on the fate of the Jewish children. Another good-ish movie that covers the same topic is "Sarah's Key", which should also be available in English (though I prefer the novel on which it is based on).

• "Une Affaire de Femmes" on the status of women

• "Weapons of the Spirit" - the movie telling the story of that one French town that helped thousands of mostly Jewish escapees that I mentioned before

• "Lucie Aubrac" - a biopic of Lucie Aubrac, a notable resistance figure. If you are going to watch this one (or read her memoirs that were translated as "Outwitting the Gestapo"), I highly suggest you also read Donald Reid's article "Resistance and Its Discontents: Affairs, Archives, Avowals and the Aubracs" in The Journal of Modern History (77:1) which covers the problems with the Aubrac story.

• "A Self Made Hero/Un héros très discret" - my personal favourite. Doesn't really tell you anything factual as such, but it does touch on an important topic of memories, and how the French remember that period. Another source that covers this (and is, I think, just enjoyable to read, if depressing) is the aforementioned "Sarah's Key", both the novel and the movie.

Other written sources I would recommend:

• Julian Jackson, "France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944" - perhaps THE single most comprehensive source of general information on that period in France. It is general and doesn't go into too much detail, but it covers almost everything there is to cover.

• John Sweets, "Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation."

• Adam Rayski, "The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance"

• "The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944" by Henry Rousso

• "Strange Defeat" by Marc Bloch, covering the defeat of the French Army. The author was a known French historian Marc Bloch, who was tortured and eventually executed by the Gestapo in June of 1944.

• "The War: A Memoir" (originally published as "La Douleur") - memoirs of yet another female Resistance member, Marguerite Duras. As with Lucie Aubrac's story, I hesitate to recommend this source to people without history training because of the controversy surrounding it. I would recommend that if you read it, you do it after having read its Wikipedia entry at least and, if possible, Reid's article on the Aubracs.

• "Vichy in the Tropics: Petain's National Revolution in Madagaskar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940-1944" and "Free French Africa in World War II", both by Eric Jennings. These cover the oft-ignored topic of the fate of various French colonies during the war. The author, who was a professor of mine, is perhaps the best specialist on the topic, certainly among those that publish in English (he has several more books and articles on this topic in French)