The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (review)

The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, by Christopher E. Forth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 300 pp. $46.95. Although other scholars have written about gender and the Dreyfus Affair, Christopher Forth's The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood is the first book to concentrate exclusively on gender within the context of Dreyfus Affair.1 Moreover, the third part of the book extends beyond the Affair to examine the "new man and the culture of force" which emerged at the fin de siecle. As Forth argues, cultural historians have tended to avoid the Dreyfus Affair, while most historians of the Affair have sidestepped the issue of gender. Forth's study has the merit of combining these two heretofore largely separate approaches, thereby offering us 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. Forth's study, as he acknowledges, owes a large debt to the historian Robert Nye, whose pathbreaking work on gender and national identity has exerted a great influence on the field of cultural history. The book, divided in three parts, is composed of six chapters, and organized more thematically than chronologically. Forth begins with "Masculinity and the Jewish Question," in which he concentrates specifically on Alfred Dreyfus and the "paradoxes of the Jewish soldier" through representations in the contemporary press. In the words of the author, "if much of the mainstream press opted for neutrality by avoiding the politically loaded issue of Jewishness, when it came to questions of honor and manhood, it was far less restrained . . ." (p. 22). Building on the work of scholars associated with the "New Jewish Cultural Studies," in particular Sander Gilman, Forth posits a direct relationship between discourses on race and those associated with gender. Comments about honor and manhood (or lack thereof with regard to Alfred Dreyfus) were thus a coded way of attacking the army captains Jewishness. Another important aspect of this excellent chapter is its illustration of the theatricality of the trial, indeed, its transformation into a spectacle to be consumed by an eager public. As Vanessa Schwartz and others have illustrated, the boundaries between reality and its sensationalized representation were blurred during this period both by the mass press and the boulevard theater.2 Finally, in the concluding part of the chapter, Forth examines the impact of Dreyfus's loss of "honor and manhood" on representations of Jewish manhood, in the mainstream press as well as in Jewish and antisemitic publications. In the next three chapters, Forth explores "Dreyfusard Fantasies." He begins by studying the contemporary conflation of Jews and intellectuals as well as representations of Dreyfus as a Christ figure. Others have already examined the "intellectual as Jew,"3 but the originality of Forth's contribution lies in his emphasis on medical categories and in his linking the fears of intellectuals to those of bourgeois males during this time. Chapter 3 explores Dreyfusard discourse on the crowd and the way in which it reflected contemporary anxieties about modernity, while Chapter 4 looks at the impact of women among the Dreyfusard ranks on the ideal of the manly intellectual. The presence of women in their camp, as Forth so rightly points out, hindered Dreyfusard intellectuals by making them even more susceptible to charges of effeminacy. …