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Contents

Acknowledgements ixNotes on Contributors x

Introduction: Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France 1Elinor Accampo and Christopher E. Forth

Part I Gender, Citizenship, and Republicanism 15

1. Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship andRepublicanism in France, 1789–1944 19Charles Sowerwine

2. Is the ‘Woman Question’ Really the ‘Man Problem’? 43Karen Offen

Part II Bodies, Minds, and Spirit 63

3. From aliéné to dégénéré: Moral Agency and the PsychiatricImagination in Nineteenth-Century France 67Matt T. Reed

4. Gastronomy and the Diagnosis of Anorexia inFin-de-Siècle France 90Elizabeth A. Williams

5. Papus the Misogynist: Honor, Gender, and the Occult inFin-de-Siècle France 112James Smith Allen

Part III Morality, Honor, and Masculinity 131

6. Social Control in Late Nineteenth-Century France: ProtestantCampaigns for Strict Public Morality 135Steven C. Hause

7. Paternity, Progeny, and Property: Family Honor in theLate Nineteenth Century 150Rachel G. Fuchs

vii

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viii Contents

8. Shaming Men: Feminist Honor and the Sexual DoubleStandard in Belle Époque France 169Andrea Mansker

9. ‘Capped with Hope, Clad in Youth, Shod in Courage’:Masculinity and Marginality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris 192Michael L. Wilson

Part IV Gender and the Dreyfus Affair 213

10. From Devil’s Island to the Pantheon? Alfred Dreyfus, theAnti-Hero 217Venita Datta

11. Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair: the MarquiseArconati Visconti and Gyp 235Ruth Harris

Conclusion 250Elinor Accampo and Christopher E. Forth

Index 259

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Introduction: Confronting Modernityin Fin-de-Siècle FranceElinor Accampo and Christopher E. Forth

As Marshall Berman so eloquently stated in All that is Solid Melts into Air(1982), paradox and contradiction define the modern experience. His def-inition still stands as one of the most useful for understanding the latenineteenth century as well as our own:

Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geog-raphy and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: inthis sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradox-ical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetualdisintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguityand anguish.1

Although today we live amidst continuing changes and challenges gener-ated by modern life, from a twenty-first century perspective it is nonethelessdifficult to appreciate the subjective sensory experience of those who inhab-ited the nineteenth-century transformations wrought by industrialization,migration, imperial conquest, the rapid growth of cities, and the changesin everyday sensory stimuli. These phenomena, among numerous others,included the increased speed and frequency of train travel and rapid transitsystems (both under and above ground) that transformed the social, psycho-logical, and geographical space of human encounters. Phenomena from therise of the mass press and the literacy to consume it to the multiple wondersof electricity transformed perceptions of reality, particularly in the instanta-neous spread of words and of images. The press had the power not just torepresent ‘reality,’ but to create its own, and to empower groups that had pre-viously been voiceless – workers, feminists, bohemian artists, anarchists, andothers who had the potential to, and often did, upset the social order. The riseof popular culture and mass consumption, and the visual bombardment ofadvertising cards and posters that accompanied it, threatened elite hegemonyin all matters of taste and class distinctions. The acceleration of communi-cations through the telegraph and telephone, in addition to print culture,

1

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2 Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France

photographs, and world exhibitions, not only gave access to the exotic, butreinforced fears about difference, global competition, and national identity.2

It is no wonder the diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia,’ the nervous disorder amongbourgeois men resulting from the stresses of modern urban life, became epi-demic in this period.3 The ‘unity of disunity’ to which Berman refers blurredthe very boundaries upon which identities were built: social class, sex, gender,race, nationality, and even what constituted the ‘normal.’ It is no wonder aswell that bourgeois male elites embraced developments in science, medicine,economics, and political thought as intrinsically progressive phenomenathat would allow them to impose order on the ‘maelstrom’ of the bodypolitic, women, proletarians, sexual deviants, or the insane. Through suchmeasures, they erroneously believed, order would also be conferred uponthemselves.

Late nineteenth-century France experienced more than its share of theparadoxes and social ills associated with modernity. From its inception in1792, the French experiment with a democratic republic – born of violentrevolution against Church, monarchy, and aristocracy – was fraught withcontradictions between the universalism of human rights and the practi-cal need to deny certain categories of people the rights of citizenship. Thefirst long-term success at this experiment – the Third Republic (1870–1940) –exhibited one of these contradictions by persistently refusing throughout itsexistence to grant women the vote, even when every other major Westernnation which had not yet done so extended the franchise in the wake of theFirst World War. The early Third Republic (1870–1914) has long attracted theinterest of historians, in particular because of its struggles with the status ofwomen, but more generally too because of its tumultuous nature, and the factthat it represented a crossroads in the process of modernization between fin-de-siècle ambivalence about change and the brave new world of the 1920s.Emerging from the ashes of the Franco-Prussian War and the civil war ofthe Paris Commune, the early Third Republic suffered constant threats fromthe nationalist resurgence of the Boulanger Affair, the rise of militant tradeunions, anarchist bombings of the 1890s, virulent anti-Semitism, and theexplosive politics of the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906). In many respects theexperiences of this period explain how and why France, and other Europeannations, took the paths they did in the twentieth century.

Historians now recognize that France’s weakened geopolitical status, partlyas a result of the defeat of 1870, spawned deep fears about the mentaland physical state of French citizens that were exacerbated by a precipi-tous decline in national birth rates. Politicians, health professionals, andsocial critics became obsessed with sexual and reproductive disorders, vene-real disease, mental illness, alcoholism, emerging feminist movements, andother violations of the social and gender order that seemed symptomaticof the Republic itself and its broader engagement with modernity. For theFrench, then, modernity was a complex and double-sided phenomenon that

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propelled the nation towards the future while threatening to overturn manyof its oldest traditions and newest achievements.

The real complexity of this tumultuous period has only become evident inrecent decades, partly as a result of new developments in social and histor-ical theory and historians’ efforts to use these tools in novel ways. Many ofthese innovations came from France itself, notably among those intellectualswho came of age during the 1950s and 1960s and who are often describedas ‘postmodernist’ or ‘post-structuralist.’ Of all the post-structuralist theoristswho have risen to prominence in French and Anglophone scholarship sincethat time, Michel Foucault has had the most marked and durable impacton historians of France, particularly among those seeking to think beyondthe methodologies offered by conventional social and political history. Tohistorians accustomed to examining the emerging capitalist, political, legal,and social institutions of the nineteenth century as ways of understandingsocial conflict, Foucault offered an alternative model of power that empha-sized the more fluid role played by discourses and techniques of constraintrather than the juridical power ‘possessed’ by specific individuals and institu-tions. As Foucault demonstrated, the post-revolutionary French world gaverise to ‘disciplines’ in new sciences such as criminology, penology, and psy-chiatry, and in the increasingly scientific field of medicine. In the absenceof a monarchy, and with the waning power of the Church, the ‘experts’ inthese professions assumed the discursive authority to distinguish truth fromfalsehood, particularly in their power to define the ‘normal’ and the ‘patho-logical’ or deviant.4 These discourses and disciplines played a special rolein the recently consolidated Third Republic, which grounded its secularistworldview in bodies of knowledge purporting to offer the light of ‘truth’rather than the obfuscations of religious tradition or popular custom. Never-theless, as Foucault reminds us, ‘truth is a thing of this world’ and necessarilybound up in knowledge regimes seeking to impose particular perspectives ofsocial reality.5

An attention to the power of language to shape and alter our understand-ings of the social world has played a critical role in sensitizing scholars tohow metaphors of, for instance, dirt, taste in food, or diagnoses of diseaseand weakness are often closely bound up with ideas about gender, class,race, and representations of the body politic. Acknowledging and unravel-ing the interarticulation of cultural categories, French historians have builtupon Foucault’s innovations to open up and pursue new paths of researchand interpretation. The groundbreaking work of Georges Vigarello and AlainCorbin provided an early indication of the productive uses to which theseideas could be put. Inspired by Foucauldian analyses as well as the sociolog-ical theory of Norbert Elias, Vigarello’s inquiry into the history of Frenchnotions of posture, cleanliness, and filth through the twentieth centuryrevealed the complex ways in which the apparently ‘natural’ facts about thebody are shaped, perceived, and experienced through culture over time.6

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4 Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France

Related to this work are Corbin’s well-known historical studies of prosti-tution, odor, church bells, and sea-bathing, which have been particularlyinfluential in ‘somatizing’ our views of class, gender, sexuality, and theimages of the nation.7 The multifaceted and influential body of scholarshipthat Vigarello and Corbin have developed since these books, culminatingin their three-volume joint venture with Jean-Jacques Courteline, Histoire ducorps (2005), attests to the continuing importance of viewing the body asprofoundly implicated in political institutions and social representations.8

Although works like these address a wider time-frame than the Third Repub-lic, they have provided important methodological insights into how gender,sexuality, and the body were bound up with representations of the nationduring the fin de siècle.

Describing, in a Foucauldian vein, the ways in which formal bodiesof knowledge construct (rather than simply ‘discover’) their subject mat-ter represents an important dimension of this new direction in historicalscholarship. Studies of psychological knowledge figured prominently in newhistories produced during the 1980s, especially the works on crowd psy-chology by Robert Nye and Susanna Barrows and the articles written byJan Goldstein on anti-Semitism and hysteria.9 This association between thediscourses of the human sciences and representations of the body politicwas further reinforced in Robert Nye’s Crime, Madness, & Politics in ModernFrance: the Medical Concept of National Decline (1984) and Daniel Pick’s Facesof Degeneration: a European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (1989).10 Both of theseworks offered new ways of interpreting how the French and (in Pick’s case)Europeans more broadly, expressed a sense of pessimism and anxiety overperceived racial, cultural, and national decline, a perspective that clearlyinfluenced decisions of political and social policy. Nye’s work in particularoffered new models for analyzing social and cultural norms and conceptionsof the ‘abnormal’ constructed by criminology and anthropology. Particu-larly relevant to a rethinking of this period are Nye’s contextualization ofthe medical concepts of deviance and degeneration, and the use of medicalmodels of cultural crisis as a way to explain – and offer apparent cures for –the widespread concerns about national decline that obsessed the French by1900.

While the scholarship described above was hardly blind to issues of women,gender, and sexuality, it was Joan Wallach Scott’s highly influential dis-cussion of gender as ‘a useful category of historical analysis’ that mosteffectively demonstrated how post-structuralist methodologies could be fruit-fully applied to the theory and practice of gender history. By outlining howgender is ‘a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceiveddifferences between the sexes, and … a primary way of signifying relation-ships of power,’11 Scott not only critiqued the social histories of the 1960sthrough the 1980s that either completely ignored or focused entirely onwomen, but she corrected the gender-blindness of Foucault’s model of power

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to account for the subtle and overt ways in which ideas about the mascu-line and the feminine operate in social discourses. This examination of theways in which power is deployed through the categories of gender – and,by extension, those of class, race, and other vectors of difference – fosteredgreater sensitivity to the subtleties of language in politics and society duringthe Third Republic. Gender and other ways of perceiving difference becamenot merely ‘useful’ categories for historical analysis, but virtually indispens-able ways of approaching the complexity of politics and society during thisperiod.

A cross-fertilization between new developments in gender history and agrowing attention to organicist models of the nation bore fruit fairly quickly,especially in studies that took women or sexual orientation as their focus. Innotable works like Ruth Harris’s Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Soci-ety in the Fin de Siècle (1989), Mary Louise Roberts’s Civilization without Sexes:Restructuring Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (1994), and Ann-LouiseShapiro’s Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (1996), the‘deviant’ gender performances of certain women were shown to have beenreadily medicalized and deemed pathological by a spectrum of medical andstate authorities during the Third Republic.12 But other scholarship has alsoshown that women – especially journalists, literary figures, some feminists,and even some murderesses in this period – could successfully undertakeunconventional behaviors if they cast themselves in proper ‘performative’roles by manipulating cultural codes to their own ends.13 Historians of sex-uality have also profited by examining the ways in which images of sexualorientation were forged out of medical discourses of pathology. Just as womenwho moved outside of their assigned gender roles could be depicted as socialand political menaces, so too did those people (male or female) whose sexualproclivities did not conform to the heterosexual standard that was so integralto dominant conceptions of the body politic.14

Scott’s persuasive demonstration of gender as a useful analytical categoryhas not only had a huge impact on historians of women and feminism, but ithas also helped open the way to a rigorous analysis of men and masculinitiesas inextricably tied to representations of women and femininity, particularlyfor the period of the Third Republic in which unstable concepts of genderfueled a sense of national crisis. Whereas Annelise Maugue provided an early,largely literary analysis of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ during this period,15 RobertNye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor was the first work to examinehow deeply medical and social views of male sexuality, masculinity, andgendered codes of behavior influenced the bourgeois society upon whichthe Third Republic was based.16 Emerging as one of the most widely-citedhistorical studies of masculinity, and exercising a scholarly influence wellbeyond French history, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor has facilitatednew inquiries into how gender both signifies and facilitates relationships ofpower. Thanks to Nye’s pioneering scholarship, a number of important works

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published since or now under way further explore these themes and con-tribute to a major reinterpretation of the early Third Republic. These workshighlight the way in which conceptions and practices of gender and of mas-culinity undergirded a host of policies ranging from the formulation of civiland political rights to public health and empire-building. Today the criticalstudy of men and masculinities is clearly on the agenda of gendered inquiriesin the Third Republic as well as other periods of French history, both in Franceand overseas. André Rauch’s two surveys of French manhood attest to thisgrowing willingness to examine critically the history of masculinities, as dothree recently published edited volumes exploring French masculinities fromthe early modern era to the present.17

One consequence of these new approaches to the Third Republic was thegeneration of novel perspectives on the Dreyfus Affair, the most divisive‘event’ of the period that had for decades been the preserve of conventionalpolitical and social historians. Building upon these recent developments ingender scholarship, but also drawing upon French sociologies of intellec-tual groups, new scholarship on the Dreyfus Affair has sought to overcomethe implicit ‘Dreyfusism’ of historical work that, by understandably sym-pathizing with the humanitarian and apparent philo-Semitic perspective ofDreyfus’s supporters, has nevertheless tended to collapse differences withinthe pro-Dreyfus camp as well as to overlook similarities between Dreyfusardsand anti-Dreyfusards. Hence much new scholarship on the affair demon-strates just how deeply embedded this political event was in the cluster ofgendered, corporeal, and racial concerns of the fin de siècle. Several schol-ars have offered provocative new interpretations of the self-images of – andtensions between – the warring camps of pro- and anti-Dreyfus intellectualsduring and after the affair, drawing attention to points of convergence ratherthan the sharp ideological distinctions observed by most scholars.18 Mostfully developed in Datta’s Birth of a National Icon: the Literary Avant-Garde andthe Origins of the Intellectual in France (1999) and in Christopher E. Forth’s TheDreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (2004), this scholarship showshow, by consistently invoking anxieties about disease, effeminacy, and mad-ness, the most vocal participants in the Dreyfus Affair reveal how fully theyexperienced the gendered discourse of national decline described by Nye. TheDreyfus Affair was thus thoroughly implicated in anxieties about diminishedmanhood that were one consequence of the modernity the French at oncerelished and abhorred.

In addition, these new perspectives on the Dreyfus Affair have shed criticallight on contemporary perceptions of Jews and women. Despite importantnew perspectives on Jewishness and anti-Semitism produced by scholars suchas Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, and others associated with the ‘New JewishCultural Studies,’ histories of French anti-Semitism have typically focused on‘the Jew’ more as a religious and social category than as a figure of discoursecrafted partly from medicalized anxieties about degeneration, effeminacy,

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and modernity.19 By bringing insights from this scholarship to bear on theDreyfus Affair, Datta and Forth each offer reconsiderations of the vexed statusof Jewishness during this time, revealing the shared anti-Semitism of bothsides of the Dreyfus controversy. Similar innovations have been made inregard to the role played by women during the Affair. Most evident in WillaSilverman’s important biography of the anti-Semitic writer Gyp and MaryLouise Roberts’s reconsideration of the feminist newspaper La Fronde, thecomplex intervention of women in the gendered and racialized tensions ofthe Affair has been amply and persuasively examined.20 Despite the pervasivemisgivings about manhood and modernity generated during this crisis, theDreyfus Affair was hardly just the business of men.

The above-mentioned works on women, gender, and masculinity have alsobeen inspired by the considerable scholarship on French feminism producedsince the 1970s, which has also remained connected to the historiographicaldevelopments described above. Three contributors to this volume – CharlesSowerwine, Steven Hause, and Karen Offen – are among the pioneers in thehistory of women and feminism. Each in his or her own way has addressednot only the paradox of why France lagged in granting women the vote, buthas also examined its corollary: why, in a nation with a tradition of advanc-ing human rights, did the French women’s movement remain the starvingstepsister to the more vibrant and visible movements in other countries, par-ticularly the US and Britain? Charles Sowerwine’s Sisters or Citizens? Womenand Socialism in France Since 1876 (1982) queried not only why the Frenchwomen’s movement of the nineteenth century was comparatively weak, butwhy women socialists failed to represent working-class women. His answerspoint to the same complexities scholars continue to explore today, especiallythe fear that giving women the vote would re-empower the Catholic clergyand the contradictory position in which that left socialist women: their ideo-logical loyalties rested first with working-class emancipation. In 1984, StevenHause, writing with Anne Kenney, continued to expose the interstices of cul-ture and politics that shaped the path of French feminism with Women’sSuffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, in which they not onlyexplained why the Radicals denied the vote for women in 1922 (fear of clericalinfluence in a wholly new context), but provided detail about what, in con-trast to movements in other countries, kept the French women’s movementso divided.21

That same year, Karen Offen brought to the center stage of French femi-nist history a fact with which demographers had long grappled: France wasunique during the nineteenth century in its precipitously falling birth rate.22

She was the first historian of women to demonstrate the political and culturallinks that French men made between depopulation, nationalism, and femi-nism at the fin de siècle. Not only did she highlight the importance that weakbirth rates had for the thinking of policymakers (thus vividly confirming theperiod’s organicist anxieties about national decline), but she explained how

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and why the mainstream movement for French women’s rights focused onmotherhood as a claim to citizenship. Offen’s analysis deepened and broad-ened the context within which feminist politics had to be understood andclearly demonstrated just how inseparable the ‘Woman Question’ and the‘social question’ really were. But she also brought attention to the fact thatthe issue of depopulation rendered the attitudes of legislators and other pub-lic officials toward women arguably more complex and more ambiguous thanin other countries. Indeed, the prospect of population decline had importantimplications for the value the state accorded to children and motherhood.Rachel Fuch’s Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the NineteenthCentury (1992) documented not only poor women’s sometimes ingeniousstrategies for daily survival, but the deep stakes the state had in the survivalof their children. The meeting of the two gave birth to the early stages ofthe French welfare state. Indeed it was motherhood, rather than individualfemale emancipation, that became a basis upon which women’s social (ifnot political) rights advanced, even though the rights women achieved inthe name of motherhood may have further weakened the French women’smovement by making it seem less necessary.23

But with regard to the question of women’s full citizenship – that is, theacquisition of full political rights – Joan Wallach Scott’s Only Paradoxes toOffer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996) offered another post-modern answer – and challenge – to the history of French feminism, andindeed to human rights movements in general. If the goal of feminismwas to eliminate sexual difference in politics, she pointed out, how couldit then make its claims on behalf of ‘women,’ a category defined as dif-ferent from men? By acting on behalf of women as a category, feminismimplicitly reinstated the sexual difference it sought to dismantle. Such wasthe paradox – the need both to accept and refuse ‘difference’ – inherent tofeminism as a political movement. She argued that this paradox had beenproduced by republican ideologies that were themselves contradictory, espe-cially in their changing definitions of the ‘individual’ and ‘his’ relationshipto citizenship. Produced by, and dependent upon the language of liberalindividualism, feminism is also a symptom of liberalism’s internal contra-dictions at various stages of its evolution. The four feminists Scott analyzedfrom the French Revolution through the Third Republic represented, in herterms, ‘discursive sites’ whose cases illustrated the unstable meanings of lan-guage. The ‘paradox’ she identifies is not a pessimistic one, for beyond an‘unresolvable proposition that is true and false at the same time,’ paradox is‘an opinion that challenges prevailing orthodoxy … [and] that is contrary toreceived tradition.’24 So even if republicans changed definitions of citizenshipin response to feminists’ demands, the continued challenge to orthodoxyin the form of paradox became (and can become in all cases) a subversive,destabilizing power that reinvented itself with every new stage of republicanpolitics. Scott’s book spawned a number of discussions, some of which we

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will see in this volume, about whether French republican ideology excludedwomen, and whether female emancipation was based on liberal individual-ism and the vote. The campaign for rights based on motherhood suggests itwas not, at least among some feminists.

* * *

The paradoxes confronting French feminists and republicans were inher-ently rooted in the broader experience of what it meant to be ‘modern’at the end of the nineteenth century. What we sometimes loosely refer toas ‘modernity,’ then, was for the French a rich and complex problem thatcould be approached from a number of different angles, many of whichare implicit in the chapters that follow. Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-SiècleFrance grows out of the historiographical debates – and the works that theyhave inspired – whose outlines we have briefly sketched here. It demonstrateshow the various theoretical and methodological strands discussed above havecome together in different ways in the study of the fin de siècle.

Part I, ‘Gender, Citizenship, and Republicanism,’ reopens the debate aboutwhether republicanism itself excluded women from the body politic orwhether exclusion resulted from the attitudes of anti-feminist men. CharlesSowerwine’s essay, providing a broad overview, argues that women weredenied the vote for so long in France because republicanism was ‘genderedmale’ from its inception in 1792. Karen Offen develops a different argument:that republicanism itself was not anti-feminist, but individual republicanmen were, and thus the so-called ‘Woman Question’ is more appropriatelyunderstood as a ‘Man Problem’ during the Third Republic. By approachingthis volume’s central problematic from different directions, these chaptersprovide essential background to the more tightly focused sections that follow.

Part II, ‘Bodies, Minds, and Spirit’ probes the sometimes complementaryand at other times tense relationship that medicine and religious moralityhad in constructions of identity during the Third Republic, thus approach-ing the issues of politics and gender from a new combination of perspectives.As republican medicine and psychiatry became increasingly professionalizedduring this period they not only usurped social roles hitherto filled by theclergy, but represented themselves as performing a ‘masculine’ service thatwas at odds with the ‘feminine’ spirituality of both the Church and its mostlyfemale adherents. The effects of this development were manifold, from thelabeling of various individuals and groups as ‘degenerate’ and the diagno-sis of female appetites as inherently pathological, to the growth of outrightoccultist movements that appropriated medical knowledge to promote theirown programs for gender order. Matt Reed’s chapter sets the tone of thissection by providing a broad account of how the concept of degenerationwas employed to make sense of the ‘normal’ subject of republican politics,one whose reason and free will needed to be in evidence. The chapter byElizabeth Williams develops this nexus of psychiatry and politics in a novel

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10 Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France

direction by examining the influence that developing gastronomy had onmedical and psychiatric diagnostics, and in particular the manner in whichit asserted gender differences in taste and consequential real or perceivedeating disorders among women. James Smith Allen’s chapter analyzes yetanother response to the modernist moral dilemmas, one that countered pre-vailing bourgeois republican culture. Papus, a physician and apologist forthe occult, was greatly influenced by the contemporary concerns about fer-tility and shifting gender roles. He and his many women followers sought aspiritual alternative to Catholicism and the growing materialism of the finde siècle. Papus’s work, his personal comportment, and his largely femalefollowing offer another complex example of how French women and mennegotiated shifting gender roles in the context of growing tensions betweensecularism and religion.

Part III, ‘Morality, Honor, and Masculinity,’ shows how the urban worldgenerated a dizzying array of mental and physical temptations and con-flicts between social classes, men and women, and within bourgeois identityitself. Bourgeois male codes of honor often played a role in regulating con-tested relationships, but also often created the paradoxes and contradictionsthat provoked contestation. Chapters by Rachel Fuchs and Andrea Manskeraddress the importance of ‘honor’ to men and women as well as the bodypolitic during this time. Fuchs explores how male honor – and women’sappropriation of it – influenced legislation and court cases regarding the sta-tus of children born out of wedlock. Mansker’s chapter provides anothercontext in which women appropriated male honor but also directly chal-lenged it by publicly shaming men for their sexual behavior and attackingtheir own sense of masculinity. For the Protestant reformers examined inSteven Hause’s chapter, urban modernity was fraught with sensual vice andstimulation, not least as a result of the proliferation of cabarets, prostitution,pornography, homosexuality, alcohol, and tobacco in ‘modern Babylons’such as Paris. As Michael Wilson shows in his chapter, bohemian malesself-consciously constructed ‘masculine’ identities by active rejection of nor-mative masculinity and bourgeois morality, providing a fascinating exampleof how this marginal group negotiated their artistic needs against the predom-inant culture of parliamentary politics. All four of these chapters demonstratethe malleability of gender identities during this time, and their capacity tobe appropriated and reworked in politically or legally useful ways.

In many respects the Dreyfus Affair may be viewed as the culminationof the gendered anxieties about modernity that mounted in France after1789.25 Part IV brings together many of the foregoing themes to offer newperspectives on the Dreyfus Affair, a series of events that not only left anindelible mark on France and on the individual lives of countless people, butwhich came close to destroying the Third Republic. Venita Datta’s chapterexamines the recent effort to rescue Dreyfus from his anti-hero status, heldeven among his supporters who were nonetheless influenced by the pervasive

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anti-Semitism. She explores the Dreyfusard concept of heroism, one that wasimbedded in the values of the masculinist culture of the Third Republic. RuthHarris’s chapter focuses on two women active on each side of the politicaldivide during the Affair – salonnières who were the center of male political,literary, and artistic networks and who had enormous influence on the maleprotagonists. Her analysis reveals the importance of subjective experience tothe public and political aspects of these events.

This volume stands as testimony to important changes in historical under-standings of the early Third Republic, shifts that are traceable to theoreticaland methodological developments that have been under way since the 1980s.The various topics addressed demonstrate the myriad of ways in whichwomen and men, as individuals and in groups, negotiated the contradic-tory expectations of the modern republican self and the insecurities inherentto mass democracy, where boundaries between male and female, the normaland abnormal, elites and popular classes, moral and immoral, good citizenor bad citizen, nationalist or traitor, were blurred.

Notes

1. Marshal Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 15.

2. Examples of works that address these issues include: Stephen Kern, The Cultureof Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1977); Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,1986); Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques, 1880–1910 (Paris: Éditionsla Découverte, 1991); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culturein Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); DominiqueKalifa and Alain Vaillant, ‘Pour une histoire culturelle et littéraire de la pressefrançaise au XIXe siècle,’ Le Temps des médias. Revue d’histoire, 2 (2004): 197–214;Greg Shaya, ‘The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France,circa 1860–1910,’ American Historical Review, 109(1) (February 2004): 41–77; andDean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), Making the New: Modernityand the Mass Press in Nineteenth Century France (Amherst, MA: University of Mas-sachusetts Press, 1999). Willa Silverman’s The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectorsand the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008)offers an excellent example of how modernity threatened elite identity: in addi-tion to recoiling from the democratization of taste in general, book collectors facedthe disappearance of what they most cherished – old books and the traditionalmodes of book production. The unstoppable use of new technologies for cheap,mass production threatened one of the most important markers of their identityand status.

3. Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: a History of Psychosomatic Illness in theModern Era (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 221; Christopher E. Forth, ‘Neurasthe-nia and Manhood in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ in Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beardto the First World War, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds) (Amsterdam:Rodopi, 2001), pp. 329–61.

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4. Among Michel Foucault’s most influential works are Discipline and Punish: the Birthof the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977) and The History ofSexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). Foucault, ofcourse, contributed heavily to the ‘cultural turn’ in historiography pioneered byHayden White and deeply influenced by theorists such as Clifford Geertz, RolandBarthes, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and many others. For a helpful overviewand analysis of this subject, see Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyondthe Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 1–32.

5. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews andOther Writings, 1972–1977, Collin Gordon (ed.) (New York: Pantheon, 1980),p. 131.

6. Georges Vigarello, Le Corps redressé: Histoire d’un pouvoir pédagogique (1978; reprint,Paris: Armand Colin, 2001); Le propre et le sale, l’hygiène du corps depuis le MoyenAge (Paris: Seuil, 1985). Also worth mentioning are some pioneering historicalanthropological investigations: Françoise Loux, Le jeune enfant et son corps dansla médicine traditionnelle (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Françoise Loux and PhilippeRichard, Sagesses du corps: La Santé et la Maladie dans les proverbes françaises (Paris:Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978); and Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie àl’apogée du Moyen Age (Paris: Flammarion, 1983).

7. Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce. Misère sexuelle et prostitution (XIXe siècle) (Paris:Flammarion, 1978); Le Miasme et la Jonquille. L’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1982); Le Territoire du vide. L’Occident et le désir durivage, 1750–1840 (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).

8. Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello (eds), Histoire du corps(Paris: Seuil, 2005–06), 3 vols.

9. Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of MassDemocracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, 1975); Susanna Barrows, DistortingMirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1981); Jan Goldstein, ‘The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anti-clericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France,’ Journal of Modern History, 54(2)(June 1982): 209–39; ‘The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 20(4) (October1985): 521–52. See also Goldstein, Console and Classify: the French Psychiatric Pro-fession in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), andIan R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledgein Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

10. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1984); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

11. Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’ in Genderand the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 42.

12. Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin deSiècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization withoutSexes: Restructuring Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994); and Ann-Louise Shapiro. Breaking the Codes: Female Crimi-nality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). See also JeanPedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics,1870–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

13. Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1992); Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography: Performing Femininity in

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Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); JamesSmith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2000); Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: the NewWoman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); ElinorAccampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Painin Third Republic France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Also rel-evant to the status of ‘deviant’ women – and the increased respectability that actualactresses achieved during the Third Republic – is Lenard Berlanstein’s Daughters ofEve: a Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). In fascinating ways, womenalso appropriated the language of republicanism, male honor, and legal codesfor their own benefit. See Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendents: Four WomenWriters and Republican Politics in Nineteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2000); Andrea Mansker, ‘ “Mademoiselle Aria Ly Wants Blood!” TheDebate over Female Honor in Belle Epoque France,’ French Historical Studies, 29(Fall 2006): 621–47; and Rachel G. Fuchs, Contested Paternity: Constructing Familiesin Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

14. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (eds), Homosexuality in Modern France (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1996); Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination:French Histories of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); CarolynJ. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies inInterwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

15. Annelise Maugue, L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle, 1871–1914(Paris: Rivages, 1987).

16. Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1993).

17. André Rauch, Le premier sexe: mutations et crise de l’identité masculine (Paris:Hachette Littératures, 2000); Rauch, L’identité masculine à l’ombre des femmes: dela Grande Guerre à la Gay Pride (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2004); Régis Revenin(ed.), Hommes et masculinités de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2007);Christopher E. Forth and Bertrand Taithe (eds), French Masculinities: History, Cul-ture and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Todd W. Reeser and Lewis C. Seifert(eds), Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory(Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008).

18. Christophe Charle, Naissance des ‘intellectuels,’ 1880–1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990);John Cerullo, ‘The Intellectuals and the Imagination of Heroism During the Drey-fus Affair,’ Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 25 (Fall 1997):185–95; ‘Religion and the Psychology of Dreyfusard Intellectualism,’ HistoricalReflections/Réflexions historiques, 24 (Spring 1998): 93–114; Venita Datta, Birth of aNational Icon: the Literary Avant-Garde and the Emergence of the Modern Intellectual(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Christopher E. Forth, The Drey-fus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2004).

19. Few historians of France have examined the deep cultural connections betweenanti-Semitism and this wider matrix of physical, moral, and gendered anxieties.Notable exceptions include Pierre Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France: a Political His-tory from Léon Blum to the Present, trans. Miriam Kochan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)and Jan Goldstein, ‘The Wandering Jew and Psychiatric Anti-Semitism.’ SanderGilman’s many important works on the medicalization of Jewishness includeThe Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) and Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient

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14 Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France

(New York: Routledge, 1995). See also Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (eds),Jews and Other Differences: the New Jewish Cultural Studies (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1997); Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: the Rise of Heterosex-uality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press,1997).

20. Willa Z. Silverman, The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-SiècleFrance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Roberts, Disruptive Acts.

21. One of the first scholarly publications on French feminism was edited by KarenOffen, Third Republic/Troisième République, a special double issue, 2(3–4) (1977) on‘Aspects of the Woman Question during the Third Republic,’ to which she, PatrickBidelman, Linda Clark, Charles Sowerwine, Marilyn Boxer, Persis Hunt, and SteveHause contributed articles. This publication was followed by Sowerwine, Sistersor Citizens? Women and Socialism in France Since 1876 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1982); Bidleman, Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the LiberalFeminist Movement in France 1859–1889 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982);Hause, with Anne Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French ThirdRepublic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Claire Moses, FrenchFeminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984). Scholars on eitherside of the Atlantic initially worked independently of each other. The first mod-ern history of French feminism appearing in France was that of Maité Albistur andDaniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 2 vols (Paris: des Femmes, 1978).

22. Karen Offen, ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’American Historical Review, 89(3) (1984): 648–76. Angus McLaren also establishedthe important influence depopulation had on social policy in Sexuality and SocialOrder: the Debate over the Fertility of Women and Workers in France, 1770–1920 (NewYork: Holmes and Meier, 1983).

23. Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the NineteenthCentury (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For an expandeddiscussion of the attitudes and actions of policymakers vis-à-vis women in theearly development of the welfare state, see Mary Lynn Stewart, Women Workers andthe French State: Labor Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879–1919 (Montreal: McGillUniversity Press, 1989); Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stew-art, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1995); Linda Clark, The Rise of Professional Women inFrance: Gender and Public Administration since 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2000). Anne Cova’s Maternité et droits des femmes en France (XIXe–XXesiècles) (Paris: Anthropos, 1997) follows in great detail the way in which femi-nists based their demands on maternal rights and protection. Accampo’s BlessedMotherhood, Bitter Fruit, originally inspired by the issues raised in Offen’s article,investigates the contested relationship between birth control and feminism, andreproductive rights more generally in the face of pronatalism during this period.

24. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 4.

25. Forth, Dreyfus Affair, pp. 5–9.

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Index

d’Abbadie d’Arrast, Marie, 137, 147nabortion, 166n, 178, 190n, 254–5; see

also children; contraception;motherhood; paternity

Adam, Juliette, 30–2, 53adultery, 60n, 157–62, 181, 184, 201;

female, 157–8, 167n, 179–81, 183,185; male, 151, 152, 157, 164, 167n,181, 183, 185; see also divorce;marriage; promiscuity; sexuality

alcohol/alcoholism, 2, 10, 19, 69, 73,78–9, 83–4, 91, 137, 139, 141, 143;absinthe, 195; and heredity, 74; wine,99, 195, 236; see also degeneration

Alliance des Unions chrétiennes des jeunesgens, 142

Alliance Nationale contre la dépopulation,251, 256

anarchism, 1, 2, 118, 208n, 238, 241,251,

anorexia, 65, 90–111, 112anti-Semitism, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13n,

217–18, 222, 224, 228, 236–8, 240–2,244–6; see also Jews

Arconati-Visconti (Marie-Louise Peyrat,Marquise), 215, 235, 237, 240

Association pour l’abolition de laprostitution réglementée, 175

Association pour l’amélioration du sort dela femme, 29

Association pour le Droit des femmes, 29Auclert, Hubertine, 33, 45–6, 50, 52Auriol, George, 197Avril de Sainte-Croix, Ghénia, 52–5, 62n,

138, 146n, 147n, 176–7, 186–7, 189n

Balzac, Honoré de, 115banlieues, les, 228Barrès, Maurice, 221, 226, 232n, 238–9,

241Barthes, Roland, 12nBasch, Victor, 223, 224Bastian, Marie, 235Beauvoir, Simone de, 125

Bebel, August, 139Bérard, Léon, 34Bergerac, Cyrano de, 220, 221, 224, 226Bérillon, Edgar, 94, 101, 106Bérillon, Lucie, 184–5Bernard, Claude, 116Bernhardt, Sarah, 204, 220, 221, 226,

230n, 232n, 241Besant, Annie, 123birth control, see contraceptionBlavatsky, Hélène, 115–17, 123Bloch, Marc, 228Bogelot, Isabelle, 138, 147nbohemia/bohemians, 1, 10, 134,

192–212, 251Bois, Jules, 113–14, 124, 125Bonald, Louis de, 29, 30Bonnieval, Marie, 123Boucher, Émile, 197Bouchez, Philippe, 78Boulancy, Mme de, 235Boulanger Affair, 2, 34, 35, 208n,Boulanger, Ernest, 241, 243; see also

Boulanger AffairBourdieu, Pierre, 12nBovet, Marie-Anne de, 121Briffault, Eugène, 97–8Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 98, 101Brisson, Henri, 237Broussais, E.-J.-V., 93Buisson, Ferdinand, 34, 48, 136, 145nButler, Josephine, 61–2n, 138, 141,

148n, 174–5

Canetti, Elias, 90, 95–6, 97, 103–4, 108nCarolus-Duran (Charles Émile Auguste

Durand), 198Cathelinau, H., 101Catholicism, 2–3, 7, 9–10, 22, 24, 32–5,

52, 65, 112, 125, 133, 142, 147n, 170,184, 215, 244–5, 233n, 239, 250–1;and pornography, 142; andprostitution, 138; and separation ofchurch and state, 245; and women,35, 114, 139; see also Protestantism

259

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260 Index

Chamuel, Lucian, 117Charcot, Jean-Martin, 93, 94–5, 101chastity, see virginity (female)Le Chat noir, 196–7, 201, 204–5, 207n;

see also bohemia/bohemiansChaumette, Anaxagoras, 17children, 8, 10, 21–3, 30, 44, 45, 47, 54,

68, 76, 82, 95–6, 104, 119, 120, 133,140, 150–68, 178, 181, 183, 186, 192,200, 242, 244, 252, 253; abandoned,156, 185; illegitimate, 153, 157, 181,182; and inheritance, 151, 157–9,167n, 182; see also motherhood;paternity; property; sexuality; women

Chirac, Jacques, 215, 218, 226–8, 231n,234n

cities, see urban lifecitizenship, 2, 11, 17, 65, 71, 72, 85,

133, 171, 172, 180, 183, 187, 195,250; and motherhood, 8, 17; andsexual honor, 186; and women, 7, 8,9, 19–62, 152, 153, 192, 205, 237, 252,253; see also republicanism

Civil Code, 23, 26, 39n, 48, 62n, 125,140, 150–1, 153–4, 158, 161, 167n,179, 186

Clemenceau, Georges, 29, 34, 225–7,232n, 233n

Combes, Émile, 245Commune, see ParisComte, Auguste, 45, 49Comte, Pastor Louis, 137, 141–3, 148n,

149nConseil national des femmes françaises, 35,

138, 139, 146n, 147n, 176contraception, 14n, 137–8, 142, 146n,

190n, 251, 254–5, 258nCoquelin, Constant, 221Corbin, Alain, 3–4, 175crime/criminality, 3–5, 68–9, 78, 79, 81,

84, 86n, 90, 91, 140, 157, 161, 178,179, 181, 185; crime of passion, 187,191n

Dante (Dante Alighieri), 244–5, 249nDarwin, Charles, 53, 124Debove, Maurice, 94, 105degeneration, 4, 6–7, 9, 46, 65, 67–89,

90–1, 112, 123, 133, 135, 164, 167n,

169, 181, 192, 215, 251; see alsoalcohol; syphilis; venereal disease

Demange, Edgar, 225, 238depopulation, 7–8, 55, 72, 135, 164,

192, 251–2, 254, 256; see alsodegeneration; natalism

Deraismes, Maria, 29, 33, 35, 45, 52,121, 175

Déroulède, Paul, 31, 238–9, 241, 243–4,245

Derrida, Jacques, 12ndivorce, 24, 27, 121, 157, 160–4, 179–80;

see also adultery; marriageDoutrebent, Gabriel, 75–8Dreyfus Affair, 2, 6–7, 10–11, 35, 46,

136, 143, 170, 194, 208n, 213–58Dreyfus, Alfred, 215, 217–34, 236–7,

244, 247n, 252Dreyfus, Lucie, 227, 233n, 235n, 247nDrieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 254Droit Humain, Le, 121, 124du Paty de Clam, General Armand

Mercier, 243Duclert, Vincent, 217–18, 225–9, 231n,

232n, 234n, 246ndueling, 113–14, 118, 124, 126n, 129n,

134, 192; and women, 114Dumas (fils), Alexandre, 154Dumesnil, E., 75Dumont, Franz, 241Dussaussoy, Paul, 34Duval, Mattias, 116, 118

École française d’homéopathie, 119Eglise gnostique, 118Encausse, Gérard (Papus), 10, 66, 106,

112–29, 251Encausse, Philippe, 114–6, 124Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique, 73,

77Esterhazy, Colonel Ferdinand Walsin,

235exhibitionism, 81–4; see also sexuality

Fabre d’Olivet, Antoine, 116Fallot, Pastor Tommy, 138–43, 147n,

148n, 149nFalret, Jules, 74family, 29, 33, 35, 44, 50, 52, 54, 57n,

133, 167n, 177, 181, 182, 184, 186,

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Index 261

256; and anorexia, 91, 104, 105; andbohemia, 194, 205; and feminists,169–87; honor, 150–69, 171, 177, 180,183, 184, 186, 187, 189n; and malesexual behavior, 170–2, 173, 176, 179,181, 183, 185; and psychiatry, 69, 76,77, 78; state/society as, 21; women in,22–4, 26, 28, 29, 55, 95, 171, 172, 180,181, 183, 252, 253; and venerealdisease, 178

fascism, 254, 256Faure, Félix, 238Favre, Jules, 47Favre, Julie, 136Fédération abolitionniste international,

138, 169Fédération des sociétés contre le

pornographie, 142Federation for the Abolition of Prostitution,

174Fédération Jeanne d’Arc, 142femininity, 5, 9, 20, 31, 33, 48, 49, 52,

53, 104, 122, 175, 190n, 193, 200,202–6, 211n, 215, 219, 220, 231, 235,241, 243; see also masculinity;sexuality; women

feminism, 1–2, 5, 7–9, 14n, 17–18,19–20, 23, 27–9, 31, 33–5, 43–62, 91,115, 123, 134, 135, 137–9, 143, 146n,147n, 152, 165, 169–91, 192, 200, 205,220; anti-feminism, 9, 17, 43–5, 220,235, 250, 252–4; historiography, 14n,20–6, 104, 239; and republicanism, 9,169–70, 172, 174, 178, 187; male, 53;second-wave, 21, 125; ‘socialfeminism,’ 170–1; see also family

Ferny, Jacques, 197Ferry, Jules, 34, 47, 136Foucault, Michel, 3–4, 12, 59, 68, 69,

159Fouquier-Tinville (Antoine Quentin

Fouquier de Tinville), 243Fournier, Alfred, 144n, 178France, Anatole, 238Franco-Prussian War, 2, 32, 72, 79, 90,

219Freemasonry, 31, 117, 121–4, 125,

129nFreycinet, Louis de, 136, 145nLa Fronde, 7, 58n, 173, 177, 180, 235

Front national, 228Fursy, Henri, 197

Gambetta, Léon, 30–2, 53, 240–2Gary, Émile, 120gastronomy, 10, 65, 90–111, 112, 114Germany, 19, 32, 47, 72, 100, 109n, 122,

149n, 219, 235, 240Gilles de la Tourette, Georges, 94, 101Girard de Cailleux, Henri, 79Goudeau, Émile, 194–5; see also

bohemia/bohemiansGounelle, Élie, 137, 142Grimod de la Reynière, A.-B.-L., 96, 97,

100Groupe indépendant d’études esotériques,

117, 120, 121Guaïta, Stanislas de, 113, 116, 117,Guérin, Jules, 238Gull, William Withey, 93, 94Gyp (Sybille Gabriel Marie Antoinette de

Martel de Janville), 7, 140, 215, 219,235–58

Habert, Marcel, 239Hacking, Ian, 69–70, 84Harlor, 48, 172–4hashish, 195Henry, Colonel Hubert, 243heroism, 11, 215, 225–7, 229n; of Alfred

Dreyfus, 217–18, 221–5, 227–8;female, 219–20, 226, 233n; theatrical,216, 218, 221

heterosexuality, 24, 46, 56, 173, 194, 198Hitler, Adolf, 256homosexuality, 10, 91, 133, 135, 137,

251honor, 43–4, 124, 150, 165, 166n,

170–91; and the duel, 134, 192;family, 157, 170–1, 183; female, 114,150, 153, 158, 170, 172–3, 177; andproperty, 151, 153, 158–60, 164, 165,167n, 174; see also dueling;masculinity; sexuality; women

Houville, Gérard d’, 220Hugo, Victor, 29, 198, 219, 224Hunt, Lynn, 21, 23, 26–7, 31, 37Huret, Jules, 227Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 113, 126nHyspa, Vincent, 197

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262 Index

hysteria, 4, 65, 69, 73–4, 79, 84, 93–4,99, 101–2, 105, 114, 135, 242; see alsomental illness; nervousness;neurasthenia

impotence, 34L’Initiation, 117, 119

Jaurès, Jean, 226, 238Jauréquiberry, Admiral, 136Jews, 6–7, 138, 228, 239–45; and

cowardice, 217, 221; and effeminacy,244; and modernity, 215; see alsoanti-Semitism

Joan of Arc, 219–21, 226, 232n,233n

Jousset, Pierre, 119Jullien Law, 180July Monarchy, 28, 97

Kardec, Allan, 116Kergomard, Pauline, 136

Labori, Fernand, 238Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 73Landes, Joan, 20, 23, 27, 31, 59nLasègue, Charles, 93–4, 101, 103Laupts, Dr, 68, 69–70, 84, 85Lazare, Bernard, 113Legouvé, Ernest, 31, 47Lenéru, Marie, 219León, Léonie, 31, 32Le Royer, Philippe, 136Lesueur, Daniel, 219Leven, Manuel, 99Lévi, Eliphas, 116Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 139Ligue antisémitique, 238Ligue de la patrie française, 35Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 53, 136Ligue des femmes, 35Ligue française pour le droit des femmes,

35, 169Ligue française pour le relèvement de la

moralité publique, 140, 147n, 148nLigue nationale contre la pornographie,

142Ligue patriotique des françaises, 35Locke, John, 21Luys, Jules-Bernard, 116

Ly, Arria, 114

Magnan, Valentin, 68, 80–2, 84Maistre, Joseph de, 29, 30Mallet, Henri Mme, 138Malon, Benoît, 139–40Malthusianism, 146n, 251, 255; see also

contraceptionManet, Édouard, 198Marcé, L.-V., 93, 105marriage, 24, 30, 31, 44, 46, 55, 115,

137, 141, 151–9, 163–5, 170, 172,178–80, 185, 190n, 194–5, 199, 203,205, 240, 241, 246; see also adultery;divorce; family; virginity

Martinism, 114, 117, 118–19, 120–5,128n; see also Ordre Martiniste

masculinity, 5–7, 9–11, 22, 33, 43–5,47–8, 51–6, 66, 96, 104, 115, 122,124–5, 133–5, 138, 143, 171, 186, 192,215, 231n, 235, 237, 255, 257n;bohemian, 193–212; and citizenship,20–1; ‘crisis of masculinity,’ 46, 49,174, 220–1; of Paul Déroulède; andfatherhood, 158; and gastronomy, 92;of Gyp, 241; and heroism, 11, 219,221, 227–8; and honor 165, 185; andJews, 244; masculinisme, 46; andseduction, 49, 133, 134, 151–3, 155–7,172, 185–7; and violence, 59n; andvirtue, 22, 172; see also honor;paternity; sexuality

masturbation, 82–3, 133, 138, 146nMaurras, Charles, 225mental illness, 2, 65, 67, 69–89, 90–2,

99, 103, 112, 113, 215; see alsohysteria; neurasthenia

Michelet, Jules, 26, 33–4, 45, 49–50Mill, John Stuart, 30, 34Mirbeau, Octave, 238Misme, Jane, 139, 183–4, 185misogyny, 23, 24, 27, 31, 44, 45, 48, 66,

92, 95, 104, 106n, 112, 114–15, 121–4,128n, 202; female, 237, 241; see alsofemininity; masculinity; women

Mitterrand, François, 222, 231nmodernity, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 18, 65,

112–13, 125, 133–4, 192, 215, 245–6,250, 254, 256

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monarchy/monarchism, 2, 3, 21, 28, 34,37, 44, 54, 71, 125, 142, 145n, 207n,225, 238, 244

Monod, Adolphe, 138–9Monod, Gabriel, 136, 145n, 247n, 248nMonod, Sarah, 136, 138–9, 142–3, 147n,

148nMontmartre, 134, 193–9, 203–6, 206n,

211n, 212n; see alsobohemia/bohemians

Morel, Bénédict-Augustin, 68, 73–5,78–80, 84

Morsier, Auguste de, 169, 174, 176Morsier, Emilie de, 147n, 175motherhood, 9, 23, 30, 32, 45, 59n, 133,

134, 186, 190n, 199, 205, 220, 253;and citizenship, 8, 17; andnourishment, 95–6; unwed mothers,150–68, 185; see also children; family;paternity; women

Motet, Auguste, 77, 81–4Mussolini, Benito, 256

Napoleon I, 23, 26, 219–21, 226, 230n,232n, 241, 243

Napoleon III, 244Napoleonic Code, see Civil Codenatalism, 14n, 178, 252–3, 255–6; see

also depopulationnervousness, 82, 92, 99, 103, 105, 239;

see also hysteria; mental illness;neurasthenia

neurasthenia, 2, 65, 102, 105, 112, 135;see also mental illness

‘New Woman,’ 35–6, 52, 65, 91, 114–15,123–4, 128n, 178

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 219–21, 223Noailles, Anna de, 219Nye, Robert A., 4–6, 20, 28, 35, 44, 46,

51–2, 72–3, 78–9, 86n, 90, 100, 114,124, 126n, 135, 143, 150, 160, 173,182, 192–3, 257n

Oddo-Deflou, Jeanne, 182–3, 185–6Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix, 117Ordre Martiniste, 117, 118, 121, 124

Papus, see Encausse, GérardParis, 51, 54, 76, 96–7, 101, 113, 116,

119–21, 139–42, 144, 155–7, 161, 163,169, 175, 193, 195–6, 238, 251, 253;

Commune, 2, 17, 59n, 79, 140; as a‘Modern Babylon,’ 10; see alsomodernity; urban life

Parisienne, La, 47Pateman, Carole, 20–1, 30–1, 43, 59npaternity, 21, 55, 62n, 134, 135, 138,

150–68, 186, 202, 253; see alsochildren; family; masculinity;seduction; sexuality

Pays, Marguérite, 235Pécaut, Félix, 136Peeke, Margaret, 118Péladan, Joséphin, 116, 117, 124, 129nPelletan, Camille, 30Pelletan, Eugène, 30, 145nPelletier, Madeleine, 27, 34, 115, 123,

146n, 190nPeyrat, Alphonse, 240Pinel, Philippe, 67, 68, 71, 73–4, 84–5,

91–2Picquart, Colonel Georges, 217,

225–6, 227, 229n, 235, 237, 238, 245,248n

Pognon, Maria, 139, 147n, 169–70, 176,178

police des mœurs, 54, 138, 188nPolti, Georges, 120pornography, 10, 137–8, 140–4, 148n,

149npremarital sexuality, 61n, 152, 199, 201,

254; and the city, 133; see alsomarriage

Pressensé, Edmond de, 139, 141, 143,144, 145n, 146n

Pressensé, Francis de, 136, 141promiscuity, 182; and the city, 96;

female, 203; male, 174, 181, 185; seealso family, paternity; seduction;sexuality; syphilis; venereal disease

Pron, Lucien, 99, 100, 109nproperty, 112, 150, 153–6, 158, 165, 172,

181–3; and honor, 151, 153, 158–60,164, 165, 167n, 174; and votingrights, 19, 72; women as, 152

prostitution, 4, 10, 19, 46, 54, 55, 61n,89n, 133, 135, 137–9, 141–2, 144,147n, 161–2, 169–70, 174–7, 179,189n, 255; see also masculinity;sexuality

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Protestantism, 10, 133–4, 135–49, 170–1,175–6, 239; see also Catholicism

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 31, 45, 53

rape, 102, 167nReinach, Joseph, 222–7, 231n, 233n,

239–40, 242–5, 248nRenooz, Céline, 123–4republicanism, 8–11, 13n, 17–62, 72,

125, 133, 136, 139, 142–3, 145n, 170,176, 187, 196, 197, 219, 236, 238–40,243, 245, 246, 249n, 250, 251, 254,256; and feminism, 9, 53, 169–70,172, 174, 178, 187

Ribot, Alexandre, 238Ribot, Mme, 238Richer, Léon, 29, 33, 48Robert, Jeanne, 121Rosanvallon, Pierre, 31, 125Rostand, Edmond, 226Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 21, 22, 50,

133, 172Roussel, Nelly, 54, 123, 146n, 190nRoyer, Clémence, 45, 53, 100

Sabran-Pontevès, Jean, 244Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Joseph, 116Salis, Rodolphe, 196–8, 203, 207n; see

also bohemia/bohemiansSay, Jean-Baptiste, 143Say, Léon, 136, 143, 145n, 146nSchwarzkoppen, Maximilien, 235Scott, Joan W., 4, 5, 8, 21seduction, 49, 133, 134, 151–3, 155–7,

172, 185–7; see also honor;masculinity; sexuality

sexuality, 2–5, 10, 49, 54, 65, 133, 144,164; conjugal, 172, 173, 179, 185–7;female, 33, 49, 134, 157, 158, 161,165, 174, 199; male, 5, 34, 46, 48,52–5, 59n, 133, 135, 151, 170–1, 173,177, 179–80, 184; Protestants and,138, 146n; premarital, 133, 154, 157;‘sexual contract,’ 43, 56; sexualdeviance, 91, 133; sexual difference, 8,17, 21–4, 27–8, 33, 45, 51, 200; sexualdouble standard, 169–91, 199; sexualeducation, 138; sexual emancipation,171, 184, 199, 201; sexual equality,43, 45, 52, 56; sexual harassment,

166–7n; sexual inversion, 91, 133;sexual orientation, 5; sexual violence,175; see also children; family;heterosexuality; homosexuality;paternity; promiscuity; prostitution;seduction

Siegfried, Julie, 136, 138, 142, 147n,148n

Smith, Adam, 143socialism, 7, 27, 33–4, 36, 43, 47, 56,

139, 143, 238; Christian socialism,139; utopian, 49, 152

Société Homéopathique de France, 119Société Théosophique, 117Sollier, Paul, 93–4, 95Steeg, Jules, 136suffrage, 171syphilis, 79, 84, 133, 135, 144n, 178,

240; see also prostitution; venerealdisease

Taxil, Léo, 125Théon, Max, 118theosophy, 116, 117, 121, 123, 128n; see

also Blavatsky, HélèneThierry, Gilbert-Augustin, 113tobacco, 10, 137, 143–4Tocqueville, Alexis de, 125Trarieux, Ludovic, 136

Union internationale des amies de la jeunefille, 141

urban life, 1–2, 10, 65, 76, 96, 133–4,137, 165, 215, 253–4, 255; see alsomodernity; Paris

Valsayre, Astié de, 114venereal disease, 2, 76, 169, 170, 178,

180, 181, 254–5; see also sexuality;syphilis

Vichy regime, 227, 228, 233n, 256Vinet, Alexandre, 137, 146nVirey, J.-J., 44, 57nvirginity (female), 54, 138, 152, 154,

165, 172, 179, 182, 199; (male), 61n;see also honor; sexuality; women

Voltaire, 242

Waddington, William, 136, 145nWilde, Oscar, 232–3n, 251

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Witt-Schlumberger, Marguerite de, 138,190n

‘Woman Question,’ 8, 9, 14n, 34, 43, 47,48, 52, 54, 56, 175, 251; see alsocitizenship; republicanism

women, 97; and anorexia, 65, 90–111,112; and dueling, 114; and heroism,219–20, 226, 233n; and honor, 114,153; and promiscuity, 203; maleseduction of, 49, 133, 134, 151–3,155–7, 172, 185–7; purity of, 172, 180,182, 189n, 199; see also children;citizenship; family; femininity;feminism; motherhood; seduction;sexuality; ‘Woman Question’

World War I, 34, 61n, 118, 139, 175,193, 250, 251, 253

World War II, 19, 227, 229, 233n, 256Wronksi, Anna, 121Wronski, Hoenë, 121

Xanrof, Léon, 197

Yver, Colette, 181, 184

Zola, Émile, 96, 140–1, 149n, 198, 217,227–8, 233n, 234n, 236, 246