An evening lecture with the Center’s Leon Levy fellow Dr. Andrew Kotick (Pratt Institute | CJH)

The Dreyfus Affair was arguably the most famous political and judicial scandal of 19th century France. It erupted in 1894 when the French officer Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was accused and convicted of being a German spy. Just two years after Dreyfus's conviction and exile, however, the accusations against him were revealed to be an antisemitic conspiracy. In the years that followed, his case went through several appeals, and in the summer of 1906, the verdict against him was overturned.

To this day, the Dreyfus Affair is seen as the culmination of antisemitism in 19th-century France and is remembered in historical memory as a fundamental conflict of values concerning morality and justice in the Third French Republic. At the same time, the affair was also a media spectacle. The Dreyfus Affair occurred in an era when larger print runs for newspapers together with surging literacy rates produced growing numbers of readers in French society. Within this media landscape, Dr. Andrew Kotick's lecture examines the affair from a new perspective by exploring the laughter it provoked. Using satirical caricatures and drawings, he investigates how visual humor shaped the emotional climate of the affair and contributed to making antisemitism a mass phenomenon. Based on examples taken from illustrated press, especially the popular weekly newspaper, Le Rire, Kotick shows how ridicule was used as a political weapon to influence public opinion, define belonging and exclusion, and reshape modern mass politics. By analyzing the visual culture of the affair, Kotick illustrates how laughter became one of the most effective forms of expression in political life.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Institute of French Studies at NYU

Image: Henri Meyer. "Le traître : Dégradation d’Alfred Dreyfus" cover illustration for Le Petit Journal : supplément illustré (13 January 1895). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain).