Georges Clemenceau

Jules Simon, who is too conservative for the Chamber of Deputies, is forced to resign on May 16, 1877, setting the stage for the "Crisis of the Sixteenth of May.”

The crisis has been triggered by President Mac-Mahon, who substitutes Simon with a new "Ordre moral" government led by the Orleanist Albert, duc de Broglie.

Mac-Mahon favors a presidential government, while the Republicans in the chamber consider the parliament as the predominant political organ, which decides the policies of the nation.

The Chamber refuses to accord its trust to the new government.

On May 16, 1877, three hundred and sixty-three French deputies—among them Georges Clemenceau, Jean Casimir-Perier and Émile Loubet—pass a vote of no confidence (Manifeste des 363).

Georges Ernest Boulanger, benefiting from Georges Clemenceau's influence, is appointed France's War Minister (replacing Jean-Baptiste-Marie Campenon) in January 1886 when Charles de Freycinet is brought into power.

Clemenceau assumes Boulanger is a republican, because he is known not to attend Mass.

However Boulanger will soon prove himself a conservative and monarchist.

This is the start of the so-called Boulanger era and another time of threats to the Republic.

Born in Rennes, Boulanger had graduated from Saint-Cyr and entered regular service in the French Army in 1856.

He had fought in the Austro-Sardinian War (he was wounded at Robecchetto, where he received the Légion d'honneur), and in the occupation of Cochin China, after which he had become a captain and instructor at Saint-Cyr.

During the Franco-Prussian War, Georges Boulanger had been noted for his bravery, and soon promoted to chef de bataillon; he had again been wounded while fighting at Champigny-sur-Marne during the Siege of Paris.

Subsequently, Boulanger was among the Third Republic military leaders who crushed the Paris Commune in April–May 1871.

Wounded a third time as he led troops to the siege of the Panthéon, he had been promoted commandeur of the Légion d'honneur by Patrice Mac-Mahon.

However, he was soon demoted (as his position was considered provisional), and his resignation in protest was rejected.

With backing from his direct superior, Henri d'Orléans, duc d'Aumale (incidentally, one of the sons of former king Louis-Philippe), Boulanger had been made a brigadier-general in 1880, and in 1882, War Minister Jean-Baptiste Billot had appointed him director of infantry at the war office, enabling him to make a name as a military reformer (he took measures to improve morale and efficiency).

In 1884, he had been appointed to command the army occupying Tunis, but was recalled owing to his differences of opinion with Pierre-Paul Cambon, the political resident.

Returning to Paris, he had begun to take part in politics under the aegis of Georges Clemenceau and the Radicals.

Boulanger gains the most popularity in the capacity of War Minister.

He introduces reforms for the benefit of soldiers (such as allowing soldiers to grow beards) and appeals to the French desire for revenge against Imperial Germany—and in doing so, comes to be regarded as the man destined to serve that revenge (nicknamed Général Revanche).

He also manages to quell the major workers' strike in Decazeville.

A minor scandal arises when Philippe, comte de Paris, the nominal inheritor of the French throne in the eyes of Orléanist monarchists, marries his daughter Amélie to Portugal's Carlos I, in a lavish wedding that provokes fears of anti-Republican ambitions.

The French Parliament hastily passes a law expelling all possible claimants to the crown from French territories.

Boulanger finds himself in the unusual posture of a general popular among monarchists forced to communicate to d'Aumale his expulsion from the armed forces.

He had received the adulation of the public and the press after the Sino-French War, when France's victory added Tonkin to its colonial empire.

He also vigorously presses for the accelerated adoption, in 1886, of the new and technically revolutionary Lebel rifle, which introduces for the first time smokeless powder high-velocity ammunition.

On Freycinet's defeat in December of the same year, Boulanger is retained by René Goblet at the war office.

The Dreyfus affair is a major political scandal that convulses France from 1894 until its resolution in 1906, and will then have reverberations for decades more.

The conduct of the affair will become a modern and universal symbol of injustice.

It remains one of the most striking examples of a complex miscarriage of justice in which a central role is played by the press and public opinion.

At issue is blatant anti-Semitism as practiced by the French Army and defended by conservatives and Catholic traditionalists against secular center-left, left and republican forces, including most Jews.

In the end, the latter will triumph.

The affair begins in November 1894 with the conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent.

He is sentenced to life imprisonment for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris and sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana (nicknamed la guillotine sèche, the dry guillotine), where he will spend almost five years.

Two years later, evidence comes to light that identifies a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real spy.

After high-ranking military officials suppress  the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquits Esterhazy.

In response, the Army brings up additional charges against Dreyfus based on false documents.

Word of the military court's attempts to frame Dreyfus begin to spread, chiefly owing to the polemic J'accuse, a vehement open letter published in a Paris newspaper in January 1898 by the notable writer Émile Zola.

Activists put pressure on the government to re-open the case.

In 1899, Dreyfus is returned to France for another trial.

The intense political and judicial scandal that ensues divides French society between those who support Dreyfus (now called "Dreyfusards"), such as Anatole France, Henri Poincaré and Georges Clemenceau, and those who condemn him (the anti-Dreyfusards), such as Édouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole.

The new trial results in another conviction and a ten-year sentence, but Dreyfus is given a pardon and set free.

Eventually all the accusations against him will be demonstrated to be baseless, and in 1906, Dreyfus will be exonerated and re-instated as a major in the French Army.

From 1894 to 1906, the scandal divides France deeply and lastingly into two opposing camps: the pro-Army "anti-Dreyfusards" composed of conservatives, Catholic traditionalists and monarchists who generally lose the initiative to the anti-clerical, pro-republican "Dreyfusards", with strong support from intellectuals and teachers.

It embitters French politics and facilitates the increasing influence of radical politicians on both sides of the political spectrum.

Algerian colons, once elected to the National Assembly, became permanent fixtures. 

Because of their seniority, they exercise disproportionate influence, and their support is important to any government's survival.

The leader of the colon delegation, Auguste Warnier, had succeeded during the 1870s and 1880s in modifying or introducing legislation to facilitate the private transfer of land to settlers and continue the Algerian state's appropriation of land from the local population and distribution to settlers.

Consistent proponents of reform, like Georges Clemenceau and socialist Jean Jaurès, are rare in the National Assembly.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU; French: Union Interparlementaire [UIP]), established in 1889 by Frédéric Passy (France) and William Randal Cremer (United Kingdom), is the first permanent forum for political multilateral negotiations.

Initially, the conference, held on June 28 and 29, is for individual parliamentarians, but will later transform into an international organization of the parliaments of sovereign states.

In 1887, Passy and Cremer had petitioned their respective parliaments to support arbitration treaties between their country and the United States.

Passy had amassed one hundred and twelve signatures from French parliamentarians, supported in his efforts by Jules Simon and Georges Clemenceau.

A year later in November 1888, Cremer led a delegation of nine MPs to meet with twenty-five French Deputies to discuss working together.

This meeting forms the first Inter-parliamentary Conference (later the Inter-parliamentary Union) in 1889, attended by such prominent politicians as Léon Bourgeois and Jean Jaures, with Passy serving as president.

Cremer, using his platform as an MP, has cultivated allies on both continental Europe and across the Atlantic, including Passy, William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Carnegie.

Using his network of contacts and his talent for organization, Cremer does much to create and expand institutions for international arbitration, which during his lifetime will be successful in peacefully resolving numerous international disputes.

This work includes co-founding the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the International Arbitration League, and gaining acceptance for the 1897 Olney–Pauncefote Treaty between the United States and Britain that would have required arbitration of major disputes as the Essequibo territory (the treaty is rejected by the US Senate and never goes into effect).

Troops fire on a workers' May Day demonstration in support of the eight-hour workday in Fourmies, France, killing nine and wounding thirty-five peaceful strikers.

The nine dead include eight demonstrators under twenty-one years old, among whom a young worker who will remain a symbol, Marie Blondeau.

The shooting evokes strong emotions in France.

It is regarded today as one of the founding events of the French Section of the Workers' International.

Jean Jaurès will visit Fourmies afterwards to make a speech here, while Georges Clemenceau will declare in front of the French Parliament that "it is the Fourth state which rose".

Fourmies, located near the Border with Belgium, had been a small town of two thousand people at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it has had an important industrial growth because of the textile industry.

In 1891, it has thirty-seven silk and wool mills, and fifteen thousand people, in majority factory workers.

In the factories, workers work for twelve hours a day, and six days a week.

Their salaries are particularly low.

Starting in 1885, the textile industry in the Nord had begun to experience difficulties.

These difficulties have had direct repercussions on workers, with unemployment and salary reductions when food and lodging expenses are rising.

The right to strike has been allowed in France since the Ollivier law of May 265, 1864, but trade unions have been allowed only since the Waldeck-Rousseau law of March 21, 1884.

Claude Monet works on the Cathedral series at Giverny, where Cézanne visits him and is introduced to Auguste Rodin, Gustave Geffroy, and politician Georges Clemenceau, who at fifty-three is embarking on a new and serious career in journalism.

Auguste Rodin's audacious conceptions inspire the enthusiasm of the avant-garde and the indignation of the academicians.

His delays and his design for the statue of Balzac bring on a legal dispute with the Société des Gens de Lettres, and, when the model is shown at the 1898 Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, it generates a violent debate in which the fifty-eight-year-old sculptor is defended by journalist Georges Clemenceau (the future premier of France).

Finally Rodin reimburses the Société and takes back the model. (The statue, cast in bronze, will not be erected until 1939, in the crossroads of the Montmartre section of Paris.)