rd Republic
Traditional anti-Semitism had existed in France for many centuries. It was based on popular belief that the Jews were Christ-killers and engaged in ritual murder of Christians. Jews were periodically reviled and persecuted, restricted to ghettos and limited to occupations such as money lending. France was the first European nation to grant the Jews full political and legal rights -- in 1791. The Jewish community in France was small, 80-100,000 by the 1890s, only .4 percent of the population. Many Jews assimilated and shared in the middle class prosperity and economic growth of 19th century France. According to Wistrich, "although violent anti-Semitic riots broke out in Alsace in 1848, there was no organized antisemitic movement before 1870" (127). Finzi added that "up until the early 1890s anti-Semitism in France had little political importance" (20). It then took a highly virulent form that reached a zenith during the Dreyfus Affair.
The growth of French anti-Semitism after 1870 was inseparably linked with the growing pains of the Third Republic which was created under highly inauspicious circumstances -- i.e. France's humiliating military defeat by Prussia/Germany; and the internal disorder which led to, and ultimately resulted in, the repression by the French state of the 1871 Paris Commune. The right of center coalition which founded the Third Republic alienated the working class and only barely prevented the restoration of a monarchy. The Constitution of 1875 featured a strong Parliament consisting of a Chamber of Deputies elected by universal suffrage, a conservative, indirectly elected Senate and a weak executive. This was a formula for unstable government, which resulted in 12 cabinets between 1871 and 1879 and 50 by 1914, only two of which before 1906 lasted more than two years (Shirer 96). The Third Republic was nearly toppled in 1888-1889 by a right-wing coup headed by a man on horseback, General Charles Bo...