The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood

by Forth, Christopher E.

• ISBN13: 9780801874338
• ISBN10: 0801874335
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-06
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr
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Summary

In 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 Emile 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.

Author Biography

Christopher E. Forth is the Howard Professor of Humanities & Western Civilization at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891--1918 (2001) and Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (2008).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: The Body Politics of the Dreyfus Affair	1	(16)
PART I: Masculinity and the Jewish Question	17	(44)
1 Masculine Performances: Alfred Dreyfus and the Paradox of the Jewish Soldier	21	(40)
PART II: Dreyfusard Fantasies	61	(108)
2 Sanctifying Dreyfus: Intellectuals, Jews, and the Body of Christ	67	(36)
3 Educating the Will: Crowds, Contagion, and the Dreyfusard Body	103	(34)
4 Adventures of the Naked Truth: Women and the Dreyfusard Imagination	137	(32)
PART III: Remaking the Male Body	169	(66)
5 The Belly of Paris: Manhood, Obesity, and the Body of Zola	175	(28)
6 The New Man and the Culture of Force	203	(32)
Conclusion: An Affair to Remember	235	(8)
Notes	243	(38)
Select Bibliography	281	(12)
Index	293