| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Christopher E. Forth. The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood. (Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 121st Series, number 2.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 300. $46.95.

In this original and exciting new book, Christopher E. Forth uses the Dreyfus Affair as a means to explore not only the contingency of manhood but also the subtle ways in which gender norms are implicated in racist imagery, class boundaries, and the construction of the intellectual in fin-de-siècle France. The book is organized thematically to demonstrate how "Jewishness" signified effeminacy in various forms pervasive in rhetoric after 1880 about the vulnerable body politic. As historians have amply documented, French commentators used the male body's susceptibility to seduction, sexual perversion, physical flabbiness, and intellectualism to symbolize threats to the nation's health and its future. As Forth demonstrates, the Dreyfus Affair mobilized much of this rhetoric both for and against Alfred Dreyfus. He analyzes how critics on both sides used intertwined narratives of gender and ethnicity not only to attack the allegedly treasonous Jewish captain but also to create a viable defense of him. Unlike most historians who have written about the affair, Forth uses this rhetoric to complicate the story that pits brave Dreyfusard defenders of republican values against anti-Dreyfusard forces who used the captain's alleged betrayal to harness popular antisemitism. In so doing, he brings forth a neglected dimension of this central episode in French history.

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