For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus
Departing from biographies of Zola (1995) and Flaubert (2006), Brown enters the French social and political milieu in which those novelists’ works were set. It was vengeful after national defeat by Prussia in 1870, and venomous following the civil war of 1871. Perfectly evoking those moods, Brown advances the attitudes and aspirations of the factions into which French society had fractured, as expressed through the popular press and as interpreted by politicians jockeying for position. Riding a Catholic religious revival, monarchists rallied for a restoration, but the Bourbon pretender stymied their plan. A surge by secularists then sharpened political and religious animosities, so that by the 1880s, France seemed eager for another man on horseback: he appeared as General Georges Boulanger. If, after Boulanger’s vertiginous rise and fall, all factions had to reconcile to France being a republic, for better or worse, then the republic’s relation to the Catholic Church, to business scandals, and to anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus affair still convulsed the politics of the 1890s. A master of the fin de siècle, Brown will engross Francophiles. --Gilbert Taylor