Did the French revolutionaries, and Napoleon after them, protect religious liberty in France? Did Jewish people enjoy the same rights that they did in, say, the U.S. around that time?
And regardless of what the law said, was there anti-Semitism in French society then to the same extent as around the time of l’affaire Dreyfus?
Before the French Revolution, Jews in most European countries (including France) didn’t enjoy anything close to equal rights. They were subject to special taxes and restrictions on where they could live and which professions they could practice.
The revolutionary National Assembly finally granted Jews French citizenship in September 1791. But within two years the National Convention, during the Reign of Terror, forbade all religious practice and closed down churches and synagogues alike.
By Napoleon’s time, religious freedom had been re-established, and Napoleon continued and extended the principle of equality before the law in his Civil Code. Here is a very pro-Napoleon web site which perhaps over-states his egalitarianism, but Napoleon’s record toward Jews is generally considered favorable. He abolished many of the restrictions and taxes imposed upon Jews in the many nations in which he established puppet governments.
I don’t know enough to give a firm answer to that, but my general sense is that the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era was more nationalist and less religious than such anti-Semitism as existed in the Napoleonic era. I’m not sure which was more intense, but they were different.
Just to expand on the above: Prior to the modern era, Jews had a corporate identity and typically lived in their own segregated communities with their own legal system, etc. (The word “ghetto” originally referred to the part of town assigned to the Jews).
Napolean had to be sure that Jews were willing to give up their corporate identity and become fully French before they would be afforded full civil rights.
The Assembly of Notables (French Sanhedrin) was convened to address these issues.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/363_Transp/Sanhedrin.html
The Dreyfus affair showed the futility of even assimilated Jews being accepted into French society. An Austrian reporter in attendance at the Dreyfus trial, Theodor Herzl, founded modern political Zionism once he witnesses the tenacity of anti-Judaism in Europe, particularly France.
The period under discussion was that of the “Jewish Emancipation” which freed Jews of the legal disabilities they had endured since the Middle Ages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_emancipationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_emancipation In the long run, it backfired on them: Jews in the Middle Ages were suspected of all kinds of preposterous crimes, such as causing the Black Death by poisoning wells, or murdering Christian children to make Passover matzohs with their blood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel); but nobody feared Jewish power, because the Jews were quite obviously powerless. But after Jews began to emerge into full membership into society, conspiracy theories (which began to be formulated to account for upheavals such as the French Revolution – Abbe Barruel blamed that on secret societies – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe_Augustin_Barruel) grew to encompass them. There had always been Judenhaas, hatred of Jews for religious reasons – and they could be excused from it by converting to Christianity; in one or two generations everyone would forget they had ever been Jewish. Racial antisemitism, characterization of Jews as an innately shifty, scheming, power-hungry breed, was a new thing, and ultimately culminated in the Holocaust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Racial_anti-Semitism The word “antisemitism,” in fact, was coined by a group devoted to such a racial conspiracy theory. You can read the whole story in Conspiracy by Daniel Pipes – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684871114/qid=1137211585/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-7700619-9802506?n=507846&s=books&v=glance.