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Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood

ISBN-13: 9780801883859
Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Christopher E. Forth
Price: AUD $59.99
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Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/06/2006
Format: Paperback (235.00mm X 145.00mm) 320 pages Weight: 480g
Categories: History [HB]

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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 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.

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""A rich and provocative study of the Dreyfus affair and the crisis of fin-de-si+¿cle masculinity... This is a valuable book because it presents the Dreyfusards from a new perspective and because it disrupts the teleology that has surrounded the Dreyfus affair.""

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Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood