My rabbi was discussing the period of Jewish enlightenment which was a result of Napoleon freeing them from the ghettos. They were freed in an attempt to make them universally French. I looked at a few articles which seem to suggest that much of this had to do with eliminating usury.
My understanding of Napoleon is limited I'm sure, but what I do remember from school is that he instituted universal conscription. If so many of these Jews were suddenly made "French," were many of them automatically conscripted to the army?
Is there any evidence to suggest that this truly was a magnanimous gesture of social reform for an oppressed people, or is it more the opposite?
First, Napoleon did not emancipate France's Jews. The law granting Jews the unqualified right to French citizenship was passed in September 1791, when Napoleon was still in Corsica. It was passed by the National Assembly when Louis XVI was still King (albeit with effectively zero power). While Napoleon accepted Jewish emancipation and exported it to the rest of Europe, it wasn't his idea. Incidentally, this made France the first state to successfully emancipate the Jews, beating the USA by a couple of months (the UK ironically passed an emancipation law decades earlier, but it was overturned within months). The French emancipation was part of a broader 'sweeping away' of all the various religious, regional and feudal laws that determined rights under the ancien regime in order to establish a singular standard of French citizenship. Inspired by enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau who, while christian (especially Rousseau) didn't view religion as an effective legal concept, they declared religion immaterial to eligibility for citizenship. So the Jews of France became the first Jews anywhere in the modern world to be able to enjoy the full rights of citizenship in the state they were resident in.
Jews did indeed serve in the military and were eligible for conscription, but their participation in the army of France predates Napoleon's mass conscription, and many French Jews volunteered during the early era of the Republic.
Source: J.M. Roberts, French Revolution Documents #1