Arch cle Sc soc des Rel. 1995 90 avril-juin 5-37 Arno MAYER THE PERILS OF EMANCIPATION PROTESTANTS AND JEWS While in the long run revolutionary situations benefit oppressed not to say persecuted religious minorities in the short run they put them in peril as well* In 1789 the Protestants -and in 1790-91 the Jews- of France were fully emancipated in 1917 the Jews of Russia Both times however there was price to be paid Of course in terms of lives the cost of religious liberation was infinitely greater during the Russian than the French revolution But even if the scale of the instant backlash against emancipation was not the same the causes and dynamics of this reaction were very much alike During both revolutions anti-revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were the chief instigators and carriers of religious intolerance even if they were not the only ones Following the emancipation of 1789 anti-Protestantism played considerable role in the resistance to the nascent nouveau regime in southeastern France particularly in the lower Languedoc Following the emancipation of 1917 anti-Semitism played similar role in southwestern Rus sia mainly in the Ukraine The theorists and action-intellectuals of the Enlightenment of the eight eenth and nineteenth centuries were sensitive to the disabilities affecting re spectively French Protestants and Russian Jews For many of them minority prejudice and religious discrimination were emblematic of the iniquity of the old order and Protestants and Jews its preeminent victims The battle against religious intolerance was part of the battle against autocracy and obscurantism While the Calas Affair of 1762-1765 enraged French Voltaireans the Beilis Affair of 1911-1913 incensed their Russian counterparts in the one trial Protestant was condemned for allegedly murdering his son to prevent his con version to the Catholic faith in the other Jew was charged with the ritual killing of Christian child Both before and after the fall of the Bastille French Voltaireans pointed to the Wars of Religion and to the Saint Massacre as characteristic of the chronic miasma of the ancien regime In like manner before as well as following the fall of the Peter and Paul Fortress Russian reformers and revolutionaries in addition to recalling the Jewish per secutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stressed that the anti- Semitic pogroms of 1881-82 and 1903-1906 as well as the agitation of the Black Hundreds revealed the intrinsic infamy of the tsarist regime and its