Several hundred Parisians gathered at City Hall yesterday to pay tribute to a French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus,who was convicted wrongly of treason in a trial that divided France more than a century ago. The commemorative gathering, organized by CRIF, an umbrella group of French-Jewish organizations, took place in advance of the 100th anniversary of the Jewish officer’s exoneration on July 12. In honor of the occasion next week, President Chirac will participate in a ceremony at the military school where Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his rank as tens of thousands of Parisians called for his death.

The conviction and imprisonment of Dreyfus dominated political discourse in France for more than a decade, separating the populace between the “Dreyfusards,” who wanted him exonerated, and the “anti-Dreyfusards,” who did not. A distinguished French novelist, Émile Zola, became the most renowned “Dreyfusard,” when, in 1898, he published in a French newspaper “J’accuse” — a letter calling the French government anti-Semitic and the Dreyfus verdict a miscarriage of justice.

“More than a century after the French Revolution granted legal equality to Jews, the Dreyfus Affair showed that almost half of France, if not more, was openly anti-Semitic,” a French political scientist, Jean-Yves Camus, said.

The scandal is widely credited with inspiring France to enact comprehensive legislation separating church and state, and, ultimately, to embrace laïcité, or secularism, as a Gallic value. “It was the Dreyfus Affair that signaled the defeat, and therefore the retreat, of the old idea of ‘l’Église au pouvoir,'”a French philosopher and leading public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, told The New York Sun, referring to the notion that the Roman Catholic Church was France’s supreme power broker.

To this day, laïcité shapes the nation’s pervasive assimilationist paradigm — that is, in the public sphere, those who choose to live in France are supposed to be, first and foremost, French. Expressions of faith, creed, or ethnicity are to take place in private. In line with this policy of fervent secularism, France, in 2004, banned Islamic headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, and other religious symbols in public schools.

“The headscarf for many French people stands for a difference that makes a difference,” the author of the forthcoming book, “Why The French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space,” John Bowen, said. Mr. Bowen teaches anthropology and political and social theory at Washington University. “It sends the message: I’m not going to be just like you, and that message is not well received in [the] classic French concept of integration.”

Yet a century after the Dreyfus Affair, the policy of secularism, meant to curb religious intolerance, may have produced the opposite effect. Riots last fall by poor and disenfranchised children of immigrants, and an influx of anti-Semitic attacks perpetrated disproportionately young Arab-Muslim youth, suggest that laïcité is untenable. Immigrant absorption and integration have been less than seamless in a predominantly Catholic country that is home to about 6 million Muslims and 600,000 Jews.

A member of the executive board of CRIF, Yonathan Arfi, said the nation’s separation laws serve a different purpose today than they did when enacted in 1905. “It was to protect minorities against the majority,” Mr. Arfi, the immediate past president of France’s powerful Jewish student union, UEJF, said. “Now people use it to protect the majority against the minorities. It’s exactly the opposite.”

Citing France’s subsidies to religious institutions founded prior to 1905, its funding of culturally oriented religious groups, and generous land grants to houses of worship, Mr. Bowen said that despite laws separating church and state, France “seeks to control religion by supporting religion.”

The Arab-Muslim community still faces discrimination finding jobs and housing.The Jewish community experienced anti-Semitic attacks as the Arab-Israeli conflict played out on French streets. And in a case that the French government has called a hate crime, a 23-year-old Parisian Jew, Ilan Halimi, was kidnapped and tortured for three weeks before he was mortally wounded and left for dead.

The law outlawing headscarves and other religious symbols in public schools doesn’t necessarily prevent sectarianism, particularly Arab-Muslim nationalism, a professor of modern Jewish history at the Sorbonne in Paris, Esther Benbassa, said. “It doesn’t deal with the real question of the discrimination the immigrants face in French society, which doesn’t allow for social and economic mobility — except in the rare instance,” she said.

And yet in an age when citizens no longer necessarily equate the French republic with the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité — freedom, equality, brotherhood — “secularism is the last value that still brings together the French,” according to Ms. Benbassa.

In America, some cross-pollination between religion and state — coins with the motto “In God We Trust” and a White House Christmas tree, for example — is generally accepted; in France, “laïcité has become a new religion, with its own dogma and ceremony” and any effort to bring faith into the public sphere is considered anti-Democratic, Ms. Benbassa said.

A New York University law professor, Noah Feldman added: “In our country we had the ideal of religious liberty long before anyone dreamt of the separation of church and state. Because religious liberty is a primary value, we tend to favor it over separation. In France, there’s no real tradition of religious liberty. What there’s been, going back 500 years, is a government-sanctioned toleration of religious minorities.”

Mr. Feldman, the author of three books, said he believes personal liberty should trump the republic’s interest in church-state separation, but the French government sees things differently. “In France, schools are to be a place where the state inculcates its beliefs, and religion — especially when it comes to Islam — doesn’t manifest itself at all.”

On the eve of the Dreyfus centennial, French Jewry remains divided about what the future holds for them. “I think the split is within every Jew,” an American writer who lives in Paris, Nidra Poller, said. “Some emphasize the despair and others count on the hope, but we all feel like we will have to leave and we all feel like that can’t be possible.”

Others, including Mr. Arfi, said France is and will remain home. He recalled the now-famous words of the father of a Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas: “A country that tears itself apart to defend the honor of a small Jewish captain is somewhere worth going.”