The advent of the Third Reich in Germany transformed the discourse around Wagner in the Parisian press. Between 1933 and 1944, the Parisian press used Wagner to confront Nazism, grapple with the idea of Franco-German rapprochement, situate France within a potential New Europe, understand past Franco-German conflict, manage life under occupation, and come to terms with the policy of Collaboration. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when his work began to provoke debate in France, Wagner had been used by the French as a vehicle to explore an enormous range of ideas and arguments about art, politics, and society. Over the space of a century, he was employed as a symbol of everything from democratic revolution to authoritarian antisemitism. When critics wrote about “Wagner,” they were not referring to a man but rather to a shifting collection of ideas brought together in the figure of Richard Wagner and his music. The one element that remained constant, however, was that Franco-German political tensions were guaranteed to result in anti-Wagner sentiment in France, frequently culminating in yet another Wagner “affair.” As the French engaged with Wagner's music and writings, and with the writings of others on Wagner, he became a means for them to articulate what was taking place in French musical life, as well as French political life. By writing about Wagner, they took positions on argu-ments about music, culture, society, and nation, and they honed their sense of what it meant to be French. However, when the Third Reich began to indicate in the early years of its regime that Wagner belonged not just to Germany, but to Nazi Germany, for the first time the Parisian press did not reject Wagner; instead, it rejected the Third Reich's claim that Wagner represented Nazism, forming a counterclaim founded on his transcendence of Germanness.

By 1933 Wagner was so firmly embedded in French tradition and history that anti-Wagnerism was almost nonexistent. Critics had finally reached a point where they could debate his ideas without being drawn into polarized anti- or pro-Wagner positions. While the press had spent much of the nineteenth century attempting to protect French music from the dangerous influence of Wagner and Wagnerism, by the 1930s critics were more concerned with protecting “their” Wagner from the Nazis.