When the Parisian dadaists led by André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Tristan Tzara sought a figure from the cultural landscape to be the target of their infamous mock trial in the spring of 1921, their choice of Maurice Barrès as the embodiment of those literary and intellectual values they vowed to attack could not have been more appropriate. A member of the Académie Française since 1906, a member of the Chambre des Députés (from 1889 to 1893 as a Boulangist candidate from Nancy, then again from 1906 until his death in 1923 as a representative for the first arrondissement in Paris), an influential journalist in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, and a noted essayist and novelist who played a significant role in the nationalist revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Maurice Barrès had become...