Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the "culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.
Historian Christopher E. Forth shows how the rhetoric and images used during the Dreyfus Affair reflected French anxieties about masculinity and modernity, and also facilitated ongoing debates about the state of French manhood through the First World War.
