The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood
DescriptionIn 1894, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, was wrongly accused of passing military secrets to the Germans. The ensuing scandal has often been studied for what it reveals about French anti-Semitism and tensions between republicanism and conservatism under the Third Republic. But because treason was considered a cowardly—and therefore effeminate—act, Dreyfus also embodied, for many, the danger of effeminate men masquerading in military uniform. In The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood historian Christopher E. Forth shows how the rhetoric and images used during the Dreyfus Affair reflected French anxieties about masculinity and modernity, and also facilitated ongoing debates about the state of French manhood through the First World War.
Forth first considers the broad gender issues that faced the French at the time of the Dreyfus trial. He examines contemporary newspaper accounts as critiques of the masculine credentials of Jewish men and shows how members of the Jewish press answered allegations of their own cowardice and effeminacy. By situating the figure of the "intellectual" within the gender anxieties of the time, he shows how Dreyfus's supporters defensively tried to affirm their masculinity by distancing themselves from "cowardly" Jews, "hysterical" crowds, and threatening women. This book pays special attention to how the Dreyfus Affair engaged with changing ideals of the male body. Taking as a metaphor the portly body of Dreyfus's most prominent defender, novelist Émile Zola, Forth explores how an emerging emphasis on diet and exercise allowed supporters to celebrate Zola's "heroic" weight loss. Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the "culture of force" that marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.
Reviews
“an original and exciting new book . . . Forth uses the Dreyfus Affair as a means to explore not only the contingency of manhood but also the subtle ways in which gender norms are implicated in racist imagery, class boundaries, and the construction of the intellectual in fin-de-siècle France” (American Historical Review)
“an engaging and illuminating study . . . Forth reframes our understanding of the overall stakes of the battle between republican intellectuals and the forces of reaction” (Journal of Modern History)
“This is an important, extraordinary book. Forth demonstrates, with great acumen and wit, how the Dreyfus Affair transformed masculinity and corporeal experience in fin-de-siècle France.” (Journal of Social History)
“an important book that adds considerably to the recent scholarship on the Dreyfus Affair by placing it in the broader context of gender anxieties in fin-de-siècle France. . . . Innovative and articulate” (English Historical Review)
“an important, innovative work [that offers] a more complex and rich picture not only of the Dreyfus Affair, but also of the concerns of the period with regard to manhood, medicine and modernity” (Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies)
“By shifting the main focus from race to gender, from anti-Semitism to masculinity, Forth demonstrates just how deeply rooted in French culture the Dreyfus Affair was. If it was fears about the degeneracy of French masculinity that underlay the Affair, then the hysteria it generated is somewhat more comprehensible” (H-France)
“Forth boldly sets out to fashion a fresh perspective, armed with the methodological insights of cultural histories of the body . . . . a strongly argued, well-illustrated and well-researched book” (European History Quarterly)
“This work is significant because of the way it boldly reinterprets a staple subject in mainstream political history by examining questions of gender anxiety” (History: The Journal of the Historical Association)
“a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of French manhood” (Medical History)