The aristocratic French writer known to her readers as "Gyp" was acclaimed by Henry James as "Mistress...of one of the happiest of forms" for her satirical dialogue-novels of fin-de-sie[accent]le Parisian society, but Octave Mirbeau declared her work "filth," as did Ezra Pound, who found it "unreadable...a sort of lady-like slither about sex." Gyp herself was as contradictory as the reactions she provoked. She wrote over one hundred novels, twenty plays, hundreds of articles, and four volumes of recollections, yet in 1908, only midway through her long career, she declared "What I insist on making explicitly clear for posterity is that I took no pleasure in writing." She denounced corsets and arranged marriages, but violently repudiated any suggestion that she might be a feminist. Politically, she was that most contradictory of contradictory figures, a right-wing anarchist. Called to testify at the trial of purported nationalist conspirators in 1899, at the height of the national disgrace of the Dreyfus Affair, Gyp defiantly chose to identify her profession not as "writer," but as "anti-Semite." Who was this impossibly prolific, fanatically nationalistic writer and activist whose polemical novels and caricatures significantly encouraged the development of popular antisemitism in France, and who made such an extraordinary mark in an era when women were still denied the vote or access to public office? In the first critical biography ever written of this gifted and troubled woman, Willa Z. Silverman brilliantly illuminates the life and times of Gyp, otherwise known as Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau, comtesse de Martel de Janville (1849-1932). Gyp's eccentricities alone make for colorful reading: she went to bed at 5 a.m. after writing all night with a goose quill dipped in violet ink, raised eyebrows with her outlandish sleeveless gowns that exposed her muscular arms, and was once doused with sulfuric acid by a mysterious veiled woman. At age fifty she fell victim to a bizarre kidnapping, and in 1932, at age 83, she retained enough of her old dramatic flair to inform one of her favorite correspondents, "I am not buried, but I am already dead, or almost, and I have come to bid you adieu." Drawing on a rich cache of previously unpublished correspondence and other documentation, Silverman probes beneath Gyp's many scandals to reveal the deep psychological and political conflicts in her make-up. A descendant of both the great revolutionary orator Mirabeau and the equally impassioned counter-Revolutionary Mirabeau-Tonneau, Gyp emerges as someone who defined herself, above all, by what she was not. Silverman shows how Gyp's anti-Semitism, anti-Republicanism, and her complicated rejection of both traditional femininity and feminism were rooted in her own self-loathing, and became the creative hatreds that drove both her life and work. Providing a fascinating window into the deep-seated anxieties and political turbulence of turn-of-the-century France, Gyp is the unforgettable story of a woman writer whose passionate energy, cynicism, and cruelty left an indelible impression on her age.

The definitive history of the infamous scandal that shook a nation and stunned the world In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Over the following years, attempts to correct this injustice tore France apart, inflicting wounds on the society which have never fully healed. But how did a fairly obscure miscarriage of justice come to break up families in bitterness, set off anti-Semitic riots across the French empire, and nearly trigger a coup d'état? How did a violently reactionary, obscurantist attitude become so powerful in a country that saw itself as the home of enlightenment? Why did the battle over a junior army officer occupy the foremost writers and philosophers of the age, from Émile Zola to Marcel Proust, Émile Durkheim, and many others? What drove the anti-Dreyfusards to persist in their efforts even after it became clear that much of the prosecution's evidence was faked? Drawing upon thousands of previously unread and unconsidered sources, prizewinning historian Ruth Harris goes beyond the conventional narrative of truth loving democrats uniting against proto-fascists. Instead, she offers the first in-depth history of both sides in the Affair, showing how complex interlocking influences—tensions within the military, the clashing demands of justice and nationalism, and a tangled web of friendships and family connections—shaped both the coalition working to free Dreyfus and the formidable alliances seeking to protect the reputation of the army that had convicted him. Sweeping and engaging, Dreyfus offers a new understanding of one of the most contested and significant moments in modern history.

In Heroes and Legends of Fin-de-Siècle France Venita Datta examines representations of fictional and real heroes in the boulevard theater and mass press during the fin de siècle (1880–1914), illuminating the role of gender in the construction of national identity during this formative period of French history. The popularity of the heroic cult at this time was in part the result of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, as well as a reaction to changing gender roles and collective guilt about the egoism and selfishness of modern consumer culture. The author analyzes representations of historical figures in the theater, focusing on Cyrano de Bergerac, Napoleon and Joan of Arc, and examines the press coverage of heroes and anti-heroes in the Bazar de la Charité fire of 1897 and the Ullmo spy case of 1907.

Located on the fringes of Paris, Montmartre attracted artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Steinlen, and Jules Chéret. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the artists in the quarter began to create works blurring the boundaries between fine art and popular illustration, the artist and the audience, as well as class and gender distinctions. The creative expression that ensued was an exuberant mix of high and low-a breeding ground for what is today termed popular culture. The carefully interlocked essays in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture demonstrate how and why this quarter was at the forefront of such innovation. The contributors bring an unprecedented range of approaches to the topic, from political and religious history to art historical investigations and literary analysis of texts. This project is the first of its kind to examine fully Montmartre's many contributions to the creation of a mass culture that reigned supreme in the twentieth century.

The Dreyfus affair remains one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in modern times. Eric Cahm's study does justice to the human drama, whilst also throwing light on the wider society and politics of the Third Republic in the traumatic years after the Franco-Prussian War. This wide-ranging survey - the only short modern account in English anchors the Affair in its full social and political context. Organised round a narrative of events, it offers portraits of all the main characters, substantial extracts from key sources in fresh translations, a comprehensive bibliography and a detailed chronology.

In Career Stories, Juliette Rogers considers a body of largely unexamined novels from the Belle Époque that defy the usual categories allowed the female protagonist of the period. While most literary studies of the Belle Époque (1880–1914) focus on the conventional housewife or harlot distinction for female protagonists, the heroines investigated in Career Stories are professional lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, archeologists, and scientists. In addition to the one well-known woman writer from the Belle Époque, Colette, this study will expand our knowledge of relatively unknown authors, including Gabrielle Reval, Marcelle Tinayre, and Colette Yver, who actively participated in contemporary debates on women's possible roles in the public domain and in professional careers during this period. Career Stories seeks to understand early twentieth century France by examining novels written about professional women, bourgeois and working-class heroines, and the particular dilemmas that they faced. This book contributes a new facet to literary histories of the Belle Époque: a subgenre of the bildungsroman that flourished briefly during the first decade of the twentieth century in France. Rogers terms this subgenre the female berufsroman, or novel of women's professional development. Career Stories will change the way we think about the Belle Époque and the interwar period in French literary history, because these women writers and their novels changed the direction that fiction writing would take in post-World War I France.

"An unforgettable portrait of a woman who became one of the most notorious figures of her day and whose scandalous story sheds fascinating light not only on her own tumultuous time but ours as well." — Harold Schechter, author of Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Guinness, Butcher of Men Sex, corruption, and power: the rise and fall of the Red Widow of Paris Paris, 1889: Margeurite Steinheil is a woman with ambition. But having been born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage to a failed artist twenty years her senior, she knows her options are limited. Determined to fashion herself into a new woman, Meg orchestrates a scandalous plan with her most powerful resource: her body. Amid the dazzling glamor, art, and romance of bourgeois Paris, she takes elite men as her lovers, charming her way into the good graces of the rich and powerful. Her ambitions, though, go far beyond becoming the most desirable woman in Paris; at her core, she is a woman determined to conquer French high society. But the game she plays is a perilous one: navigating misogynistic double-standards, public scrutiny, and political intrigue, she is soon vaulted into infamy in the most dangerous way possible. A real-life femme fatale, Meg influences government positions and resorts to blackmail—and maybe even poisoning—to get her way. Leaving a trail of death and disaster in her wake, she earns the name the "Red Widow" for mysteriously surviving a home invasion that leaves both her husband and mother dead. With the police baffled and the public enraged, Meg breaks every rule in the bourgeois handbook and becomes the most notorious woman in Paris. An unforgettable true account of sex, scandal, and murder, The Red Widow is the story of a woman determined to rise—at any cost.