| Sumario: | Since Emile Zola's "J'accuse," the Dreyfus affair has often been conceptualized as a struggle between truth and raison d'état. In this interpretation, the antidreyfusards voluntarily cede any claim to the concept of truth in favor of arguments based in the exigencies of national security. This article suggests, however, that antidreyfusard rhetoric and imagery also employed a concept of truth: a subjective truth that depended on personal credibility as established through opposition to imagined enemies of France. The caricaturist Caran d'Ache represented this relational truth in scenes of antidreyfusard women identifying and rejecting dreyfusard or Jewish men. These scenes allowed the artist to emphasize the personal and conditional nature of this sort of truth by showing ambiguous sexualized or aggressive women acquiring credibility through their hostile interactions with dreyfusard or Jewish adversaries, thereby permitting the representation of a truth based on human interaction and relationships.
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