In The Second Sex, the Dreyfus Affair is a brief but pointed example in Simone de Beauvoir’s argument about women’s political situation. She observes that women were even more violently anti-Dreyfusard than men, using the episode to illustrate how women could participate in public controversy without thereby gaining an independent political position. The reference is not a chronicle of the affair’s events: it is evidence in a wider account of the ways women’s political attitudes and actions were formed within a society whose institutions and history were controlled by men.

The Affair in the Historical Argument

The Dreyfus Affair appears in a discussion of the ways women may interpret social conflict through a stark opposition between good and evil. De Beauvoir describes women who, excluded from active responsibility and public decision-making, may look for a culpable enemy and imagine that a good government will simply remove it. She says women were more violently anti-Dreyfusard than men, but does not supply names, individual cases, or a detailed account of the dispute. The example supports her analysis of political attitudes rather than establishing a separate narrative of the affair.

Political Passion and Social Position

The reference complicates any simple picture of women as politically indifferent. De Beauvoir’s claim is that women could take sides with exceptional intensity; that intensity, however, did not necessarily translate into independent power or a sustained challenge to the social order. Her broader account holds that women’s history was written by men and that women rarely formed a separate political force. Even collective pressure, she argues, succeeded when men were willing to yield to it. Read in this context, the affair illustrates the distinction between strong political feeling and the ability to shape political institutions.

The Wider Critique of Political Agency

De Beauvoir places women’s responses within a history in which men created the dominant values, customs, and religions and held women’s fate in their hands. Women’s interventions in world affairs, she writes, generally took place alongside men and from a masculine point of view. The Dreyfus Affair reference therefore does not explain women’s stance through an inherent female character; it forms part of her argument that political attitudes emerge within historically produced conditions of dependence and exclusion.

Elsewhere, de Beauvoir rejects the idea that femininity is an immutable essence, treating human characteristics as shaped by social situations. Her use of the affair follows the same method: rather than treating women’s political behavior as timeless, she relates it to the structures that limit women’s agency and shape their available forms of participation. The episode’s significance in the book lies in this analytical role, not in a developed account of its participants, chronology, or outcome.