The purpose of this study is to look into the collective representation for the Jews and the transition process of antisemitic discourse from the 1st Industrial Revolution and the emergence of early socialism in the 1830s to the Dreyfus revision movement in 1898. The French Revolution was a momentous event to decide the fate of the Jews in France. While the Jews being liberated under the 1791 Law and granted equal civil rights, their assimilation into French society was not very easy. Prejudice and hatred against the vagabond Jews since the Middle Ages led to the christian antisemitism, and while industrialization was promoted in the early 19th century, the Jews became the target of economic antisemitism by nationalists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and syndicalists who equated the ‘Jews=Bankers= Capitalism’. Additionally, the Jewish question turned into a social problem according as the theory of racial antisemitism emerged in the 1880s.
French antisemitism in the 19th century is not the monopoly of a particular political ideology, but both left and right wings thought economic antisemitism on the basis of the Jewish aversion. Religious and economic antisemitism having been combined with racial antisemitism since the 1880s, french society formed the crucible of antisemites with a variety of political spectrum showing their loathing for the Jews and even shouting the Jews’ deportation and extermination. There are, of course, two points to make clear in analyzing the french left-wing antisemitism of the 19th century. One is that any left-wing party didn’t put forward antisemitism as its political platform, and the other is that, at least until before the Dreyfus Affair, antisemitism remained as a secondary issue. The fact that the Left’s antisemitic activities faced criticism inside themselves also should not be overlooked.
Combined with the elements of ‘anticapitalism’, ‘republican nationalism’ and ‘anticlericalism’, the 19th century French left-wing antisemitism was a mirror of the times from the aspect of being converged together with right-wing antisemitism rather than being at the antipode of the latter.