49. _Effect of the French Revolution._--In close relation to the German progress in Mendelssohn's age, events had been progressing in France, where the Revolution did much to improve the Jewish condition, thanks largely to the influence of Mirabeau. In 1807 Napoleon convoked a Jewish assembly in Paris. Though the decisions of this body had no binding force on the Jews generally, yet in some important particulars its decrees represent principles widely adopted by the Jewish community. They proclaim the acceptance of the spirit of Mendelssohn's reconciliation of the Jews to modern life. They assert the citizenship and patriotism of Jews, their determination to accommodate themselves to the present as far as they could while retaining loyalty to the past. They declare their readiness to adapt the law of the synagogue to the law of the land, as for instance in the question of marriage and divorce. No Jew, they decided, may perform the ceremony of marriage unless civil formalities have been fulfilled; and divorce is allowed to the Jews only if and so far as it is confirmatory of a legal divorce pronounced by the civil law of the land. The French assembly did not succeed in obtaining formal assent to these decisions (except from Frankfort and Holland), but they gained the practical adhesion of the majority of Western and American Jews. Napoleon, after the report of the assembly, established the consistorial system which remained in force, with its central consistory in the capital, until the recent separation of church and state. Many French Jews acquired fame, among them the ministers Crémieux (1796-1879), Fould, Gondchaux and Raynal; the archaeologists and philologians Oppert, Halévy, Munk, the Derenbourgs, Darmesteters and Reinachs; the musicians Halévy, Waldteufel and Meyerbeer; the authors and dramatists Catulle Mendès and A. d'Ennery, and many others, among them several distinguished occupants of civil and military offices.