Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis in French Masculinity (review)

The Dreyfus Affair stands as one of those inaugural events in modern European history. The story of Alfred Dreyfus—who was condemned out of sheer bigotry by military officers, ideologues, and politicians, and who was eventually rehabilitated by engaged intellectuals driven by their thirst for truth and justice—remains one of the great triumphs of the intellectual left. The Affair marked, amongst other things, the first time that modern antisemitism erupted in French public life; it demonstrated the disturbing new power of mass politics and media; and it saw a new being—the engaged intellectual—enter the public stage. The Affair serves, still, as a kind of political morality tale, in which wooden-headed reactionaries refused to acknowledge the truth—despite all the evidence to the contrary—and how, even when forced to admit error, they did so begrudgingly, without reflecting upon the values that had caused error and injustice in the first place.

Christopher Forth’s brilliant book takes this narrative and puts it in a startling context, showing that the Dreyfus Affair encapsulated, in stunning ways, powerful anxieties about masculinity, modernity, and the body in fin-de-siècle France. In this protracted crisis, public figures made the personal political, as they elevated “hitherto localized anxieties about masculine identity to national proportions, thus expressing and perhaps even accelerating changes in manly ideals that had been developing in earlier years” (5). Like many sociological and anthropological studies of masculine behavior, then, Forth’s study assumes that masculinity lacks a stable referent; rather, it is a cultural artifact that is constantly being constructed, challenged, and negotiated in specific social settings.

According to Forth, the Dreyfus affair intersected with a general panic over male identity in the fin de siècle. For many contemporaries, the “sensory overload of urban life”—that is, street cars, automobiles, trains, newspapers, advertising, material abundance, and mass spectacle—had made society sick and neurotic; quite literally, modernity had degenerated mind and body and caused moral decline by battering down traditional beliefs and practices. These forces did not spare ideal manhood. The world of mass politics and spectacle, on the one hand, and the passive lifestyle associated with bourgeois work and leisure, on the other, undermined traditional views of male chivalry and strength, and made older ideals about force, honor, and adventure all but irrelevant. Consequently, bourgeois men wanted to substantiate their masculinity in new ways, and demonstrate their prowess in the public realm. For many commentators, the Dreyfus Affair became a new male quest, one that tested masculine honor and endurance.

In the first part, Forth examines how anxieties about the Jewish body influenced debates about Alfred Dreyfus himself. Traditional society viewed Jewish men as hardly men at all: they were, it was alleged, overly bookish, effeminate, and cowardly—hardly qualities associated with good soldiers (these concerns perhaps explain Dreyfus’s austere discipline and control in face of adversity). Crucially, this stereotype was shared by people who consciously distanced themselves from political antisemitism; and it caused endless anxiety for France’s highly assimilated Jews, who responded with images of manly Hebrew soldiers from the kingdom of Israel. (Similarly, east of the Rhine, Max Nordau, the high priest of degeneration theory, also clamored for a “new muscle Jew.”) These concerns over moral and physical degeneracy—not limited to antisemitic discourse—opened anxious discussions about inter-male relations within the military itself, because contemporaries feared that intimacy amongst soldiers might break down heterosexual norms and cause what the French called “la vice allemande”—that is, sodomy.

In the second part, Forth examines how both Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards used manly ideals to defend their views and recruit supporters. Dreyfusards were particularly anxious on this point: not just because they were accused of defending an unmanly Jewish traitor, but also because critics had long claimed that intellectuals were effete and neurotic (qualities associated with the dandy and the neurastheniac). To be sure, this image was zealously exploited by anti...