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“A Beastly Affair”: Visual Representations of Animality and the Politics of the Dreyfus Affair

2011; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/cjh.46.1.35

2292-8502

David C. Jones,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

This article investigates the proliferation of animal imagery in the visual production of the Dreyfus Affair. The use of animal symbols and motifs, for the most part found in the anti-Dreyfusard “gutter press,” are situated within deep fin-de-siècle concerns about the nation and the body. Drawing on politically marginal, yet popular newspapers such as Edouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole Illustrée and Henri Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant, fears of national and bodily infestation, physiognomic stereotyping, and fantasies of teleological redemption are found to be rendered through the use of the animal as a device. The article also examines the scientific and literary developments in the study of the “natural,” within which the human relationship to the animal is constructed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — providing a discursive framework from which political caricature drew its content and form.