%0 Journal Article
%T A paradox in the Dreyfus Affair: The curious case of Saint
%A Roderick Cooke
%J French Cultural Studies
%@ 1740-2352
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0957155818810680
%X During the brief flourishing of his literary movement, ¡®le naturisme¡¯, in the late 1890s, the young poet Saint-Georges de Bouh¨¦lier (1876¨C1947) became an active and engaged Dreyfusard, despite harbouring anti-Semitic thoughts and being an aggressive nationalist and revanchist. This article explains the ostensible paradox by tracing Bouh¨¦lier¡¯s Dreyfusard engagement back through his evolving aesthetic doctrines of the preceding years. His conception of poetry, in which the poet was both a privileged interpreter of the hidden grandeur of common folk and a humble servant of their collective traditions, allowed him to characterise ¨¦mile Zola¡¯s role in the Affair along similar lines. Consequently, aesthetics is able to elucidate Bouh¨¦lier¡¯s Dreyfusism in a way that his broader ideology cannot. His intervention in the crisis is a case study in the relationship between aesthetic and political thought, demonstrating the ability of aesthetic ideas to determine political choices, rather than emanating from them
%K aesthetics
%K Saint-Georges de Bouh¨¦lier
%K Dreyfus Affair
%K naturisme
%K politics
%K ¨¦mile Zola
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0957155818810680