Although Boulanger had met an undignified end, his movement had been a great force. It brought the Republic and parliamentary regime into the most dangerous crisis it had known since its creation. It was at this juncture that the government met and eliminated a bothersome ideological question, that of the Republic's monarchist origins. Thus relieved of its ideological handicap, the regime emerged greatly strengthened. It had survived the initial crisis due to combination of good fortune, the weakness of the leading figure, ineptitude on the part of the attackers and a particularly astute political manoeuvre. However the Third Republic's real strength would lie in the ability to change its political character in response to the crisis.
The Republic's weakness had been clearly exposed by the Boulangist movement; it had shaken the parliamentarians out of their complacency and forced them to respond to popular opinion. The Jacobin vision of politics had been the promise of the revolutionary movement from the fall of the Emergency Republic of 1792-4. This vision was repeatedly denied, as each victorious party once it had assumed power, tended to adopt the unsuccessful working procedures of the party it superseded. The government of the Third Republic was no exception to this pattern. Republican in name but highly elitist in character, politics in France remained a consistent target for attack.
The Boulangist protest was based in large measure upon a critique of moderate republicans (Opportunists), for having fallen victim to the style of political behaviour of the Orleanists, from whom they had recently wrestled power. Self conscious of the need to harness popular enthusiasm, Boulangist leaders accented the social aspects of their programme as the campaign drew towards a close. So if Boulangism did not begin as a precursor to socialism, it did in fact end on a socialist note. As far as the Republic was concerned, the indirect effect of the Boulangist demand for social reform cannot be discounted.
The Boulangist crisis awakened the moderate Republicans to the reality of the social question, and to the growing power of the labour force. Hence they cast their support for social security legislation in the following years, and thus embarked on a course which pointed to a larger responsibility for the government, in providing for the economic and social well being of its citizenry. The Republic had nevertheless been chastened by the ordeal and had only survived due to the ability to marginalize popular protest.
Public opinion had also been shaken by the comparatively easy way in which an irresponsible dictatorship could pose a threat to democratic power. The mystique of Bonapartism had been tarnished, and the plain yet democratic regime was once again in favour. In 1893 the reaction against Boulangism provided the greatest Republican election triumph, ending the possibility of the immediate return of the monarchy and thus turned the attention of politicians to other issues. However, Boulangism with its radical origins, its, appeal to class collaboration, its self-advertisement and its direct appeal to the people, was to be a forerunner of all future mass political movements.
By the end of the 1880's, with the Boulangist challenge surmounted, the future of the Republic was secure. The 1889 election was the last in which the question of regime was a real issue. The bulk of the Right had given up hope of reversing the verdict of 1877 and it now seemed more profitable to use their political weight within the Republican system. But the problem of an army which might produce a Caesar at any moment remained.
Strongly influenced by Catholic ideology, distrustful of democratic ideas and refusing the principle of obedience, the army remained the great hope of the conservative strata of society. The Boulangist crisis was the first stage in the Right becoming peculiarly nationalist, until then it had been accused of being anti-nationalist and of subordinating French national interests to those of the Church. Now it had emerged as supporter of a particularly aggressive form of nationalism, while the Left had moved into a posture of opposing militarist men and their ideas. The Dreyfus Affair would mark the main stage in this reversal of party positions with regards to national unity, and the army would thus present the Republic with its second great challenge.
The pre-conditions for the Affair were laid down in 1891, when Germany extended the Triple Alliance to include Austria-Hungary and Italy; it was an alliance which seemed particularly hostile to France. In addition, the insoluble problem of Alsace-Lorraine excluded any possibility of rapprochement with Germany. It was therefore inevitable that in such a period of insecurity and doubt, the position of the French army would attract a great deal of public attention. The nation needed to know if the army was loyal to the Republic, if it was becoming the embodiment of certain religious opinion and if it represented an independent power within the state. Was the army the saviour of the nation or the destroyer of democratic principles? It was against this background of self consciousness that the Dreyfus affair assumed such crucial importance.
The case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the general staff wrongly accused of spying, became a major political affair which divided French society into two bands of passionate partisans. Those who believed him to be innocent declared that the military authorities, who had accused and judged him, had stopped at nothing to conceal their duplicity and incompetence. They had, as the Dreyfusards pointed out, forged and suppressed evidence and conspired to prevent justice in the interest of what appeared to be an anti-Semitic, anti-Republican officer corps. To the opponents of Dreyfus, the army seemed the defender of the security and greatness of France, and as such, the military as an institution was above criticism.
While Jules Guesde and his followers saw the issue as a quarrel between two groups of the ruling class, for Jean Jaures, Dreyfus' condemnation was an act of injustice, irrespective of class or status and therefore must be reversed if the Third Republic was ever to progress toward an equal society. The issue in the affair was a confused one, the belief in the innocence or guilt of an individual being merely the starting point for more general differences in opinion.
The affair is notorious for the way in which it polarised French public opinion, but the seriousness of the affair on French political life remains in question. Certainly it appears to have had little impact on the elections of May 1898. The obsession of the press with the affair and the amazing violence of tone which it adopted, were untypical of public opinion and by the autumn of 1899 there can be little doubt that the public was becoming bored with the whole incident. The affair was to some degree an artificial crisis in that the supporters of Dreyfus declared that their opponents were endangering the Republican regime, yet there was no organized group on the Right capable of overthrowing the Republic. The violent anti-Republicanism of Dreyfus' opponents therefore remained rhetorical rather than practical. However do these factors alone explain the remarkable ability of the Republic to survive its second major crisis?
The social forces which rallied to the defence of Dreyfus and to civilian democracy are significant: they reveal the nature of the fundamental cleavage which the incidents of the affair exposed. In addition to the leading Radicals and Socialists, the main classes from which the Dreyfusards drew their support were the teaching and university professions, the lower middle classes and the industrial workers of the larger towns. To the negative emotions of anti-clericalism and anti-militarism was added moral faith, so vital to the survival of the Republic that no social order could evolve unless it was based on justice and respect for the individual. Once the forces of the older aristocracy, the service leaders, clericals and authoritarians found themselves opposing this faith, they were ultimately doomed. Yet the clash of forces was not resolved without a prolonged political struggle in which the Republic itself faced moments of extreme danger.
The two serious plots of 1898 and 1899 involved all the leading Bonapartists, monarchists and anti-Dreyfusards. However, these were safely overcome partly by good fortune, partly because of a change in public opinion and partly due to the political skill of Waldeck-Rousseau. The combination of Radicalism and Socialism, symbolised by Waldeck-Rousseau and Jaures, turned the tide in favour of the ideals of revolutionary tradition. The Waldeck Rousseau government therefore presented a movement of Republican solidarity, in which the Left rallied to the support of parliament. The government also ended any threat to the Republic by prosecuting prominent nationalists and royalists. The Great War did much to reconcile army and nation, and the pre-war appointment by Clemenceau, of a Dreyfusard Colonel to the Ministry of War, prevented any further challenge to parliamentary sovereignty from the direction of the general staff.
The issue was therefore smothered rather than solved, on the one hand by the separation of Church and state, which removed the clerical stimulus from militarist movements, and on the other, by the increasing menace of Germany which firmly rallied the nation and armed services as never before. Moreover the social classes which had supported militarism were being increasingly distracted by the alternative energies and ambitions of colonialism.
The affair added moral fervour to the political struggle and was ultimately responsible for giving a new lease of life to the Republic, by providing it with a direction and enthusiastic vigour. The single most important political result of the affair was that it brought the workers, at least temporarily, back to the Republic, as the democratic and popular ideals of the revolution had been re-awakened. The country experienced a shift to the left and a new found socialist support for participation in government. The petty bourgeoisie did not pose a threat as they were prepared to work with and modify institutions, but not to overthrow them. The political influence of the Catholics had been reduced, and the anti-clerical, anti-militarist radical bloc was now solidly Republican.
The Republic had been saved, but at the cost of some fanaticism. The danger still persisted, as the affair had given birth to the formidable intellectual opposition of the Action Francaise movement. The Dreyfus affair opened up to the Right an arena for propaganda and activity into which it plunged with great ardour. It helped a good deal in furnishing the movement with a doctrine, most notably anti-Semitism. Nationalism joined with Conservatism and thus became the defender of ancient institutions. However, as a result it supplied justification and energy to the cause of defending the constitution, and as a permanent danger rendered a useful service to the Republic by making its survival more likely.
In conclusion, the thirty five years between 1870 and 1905, were in a sense spent liquidating the past, in thrashing out the old conflicts between Church and state, clerical and anti-clerical, monarchy and Republic, militarism and parliamentary democracy. It seems clear that the Boulanger crisis and the Dreyfus affair ultimately served the cause of the Republic, strengthened democracy, ensured defeat of the forces of reaction and ruined any hope of a restoration of the old order. The fusing of anti-Semitism, with a common hatred of Dreyfusards, parliament and the Republic, all had as their counter effect the unification of the Republican partisans behind the regime. Moreover, the crises had shown that the political system of the Republic was capable of moments of great vigour and resilience. However it had also shown the underlying stability and conservatism of much of French society, and the desire of provincial France to get on with its own affairs.
The most successful politicians of the Third Republic were those who manipulated the parliamentary machine in such a way as to further the interests of the rural areas and quiet country towns. It was for this reason that throughout the two major crises, the regime was never seriously in danger. While those on the right called for strong government, they were not able to overthrow a system which seemed to satisfy the desire of Frenchmen to be free of Government interference. In fact few Frenchmen wanted a strong government as most were content with verbal criticism, while supporting economic policies which did not touch their pockets. The Dreyfus Affair marked the beginning of a period of government in which the Radical Socialist party introduced measures of mild social reform, while not interfering with the economic interests of their electors. The power of moderate opinion in the French provinces was also built into the constitution, and it is perhaps a measure of the satisfaction felt with the system of the Third Republic, that demands for further reform of the Senate after 1882 were slow to come and never very important. Neither the Boulangists nor the anti-Dreyfusards were thus able to overcome the vested interests which the Third Republic had created for itself. The crisis of 1914 was to reveal the underlying national unity of France, as patriotism overcame all doubts on the right about democracy, and all doubts of the left about bourgeois society. The Dreyfus Affair and Boulanger crisis had revealed just how deep and widespread the support for the Republican constitution was, and it would not be until the 1930's that the system was once again seriously challenged.
Bibliography
Curtis, Three Against the Third Republic
Anderson France 1870-1914
Johnson France and the Dreyfus Affair
Thomson Democracy in France since 1870
Bredin The Affair: The case of Alfred Dreyfus
Joll Europe since 1870
Hutton "Popular Boulangism in France 1881-90" Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 11 1976
