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 Amile 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 theDreyfus 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.
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