A paradox in the Dreyfus Affair: The curious case of Saint-Georges de Bouhélier

Abstract

During the brief flourishing of his literary movement, ‘le naturisme’, in the late 1890s, the young poet Saint-Georges de Bouhélier (1876–1947) 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 Bouhélier’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 Émile Zola’s role in the Affair along similar lines. Consequently, aesthetics is able to elucidate Bouhélier’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.