Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair: the Marquise Arconati Visconti and Gyp

Conventional political history is notorious for the ‘maleness’ of its exposition, and standard accounts of the Dreyfus Affair all too readily conform to this stereotype. As an espionage tale, the Affair falls within the masculine arenas of diplomatic and military history, while as a story of political crisis, its main characters remain ministers, jurists, and polemicists.1 The history of the struggle between ‘intellectuals’ and ‘anti-intellectuals,’ moreover, focuses attention on the leading lights of French academia and literature, almost all men, who tussled over the primary values of French politics and society.2