Universalism, long seen as synonymous with the French republic, fell out of favor among left-leaning intellectuals in the last decades of the twentieth century. The idea that one law applies equally to all people and that the individual (rather than the ethnic or religious group) is the sole bearer of rights within the state, French universalism was criticized for masking social inequalities and suppressing minority difference. Since the start of the new millennium, however, conflicts over the integration of France's large Muslim minority have led many politicians and intellectuals to reassert what they take to be universalism’s imperative: that ethnicity and religion must be excluded from the public sphere. For the new universalists, the health of the French republic depends on resisting communautarisme, the privileging of ethnic or religious affiliation over national affiliation, which they often associate with American-style multiculturalism.

France's new universalists frequently fault Muslims for their supposedly ostentatious displays of difference and seeming unwillingness to integrate. And although contemporary French Jews are also criticized for their communautarisme, Jewish emancipation during the French Revolution is cited as a model for the successful incorporation of a minority group within a universalist framework. According to most accounts, the revolutionaries extended citizenship to the Jews on the condition that they assimilate to French culture. The famous speech by Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre in favor of Jewish emancipation, delivered in 1789, has long been seen to express the conditional nature of this offer: ‘Il faut refuser tout aux juifs comme nation, et accorder tout aux juifs comme individus.’ To become worthy of rights, it has long been assumed, the Jew had to become like other Frenchmen. Even defenders of the Revolution's treatment of Jews, like Robert Badinter, subscribe to this view: ‘c’est toute la doctrine de l’assimilation qui est exprimée la par Clermont-Tonnerre.’

But did the Revolution really demand assimilation of the Jews as a quid pro quo? In this essay, I will show that the Jews’ defenders at the end of the eighteenth century argued for emancipation with a range of results in mind. Their answers to what would later come to be known as the ‘Jewish Question,’ which asked whether Jews belonged in the modern nation-state and, if so, on what terms, can be plotted on a continuum between the opposing poles of assimilation and pluralism.