Georges Ernest Boulanger

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.

Georges Ernest Boulanger, confident of political support, had begun provoking the Germans: he has ordered military facilities to be built in the border region of Belfort, forbidden the export of horses to German markets, and even instigated a ban on representations of Lohengrin.

Germany had responded by calling to arms more than seventy thousand reservists in February 1887; war had been averted after the Schnaebele incident (April 1887), but Boulanger is perceived by his supporters as having come out on top against Bismarck.

For the Goblet government, Boulanger is an embarrassment and risk, and becomes engaged in a dispute with Foreign Minister Émile Flourens.

Goblet is voted out of office on May 17 and replaced by Maurice Rouvier.

The latter sacks Boulanger, and replaces him with Théophile Adrien Ferron on May 30.

The French government is astonished by the revelation that Boulanger had received around one hundred thousand votes for the partial election in Seine, without him even being a candidate.

He is removed from the Paris region and sent to the provinces, appointed commander of the troops stationed in Clermont-Ferrand.

Upon his departure on July 8, a crowd of ten thousand takes the Gare de Lyon by storm, covering his train with posters titled Il reviendra ("He will come back"), and blocking the railway, but he is smuggled through on a switch engine.

The general decides to gather support for his own movement, an eclectic one that capitalizes on the frustrations of French conservatism, advocating the three principles of Revanche (Revenge on Germany), Révision (Revision of the Constitution), Restoration (the return to monarchy).

The common reference to it has become Boulangisme, a term used by its partisans and adversaries alike.

Immediately, the option is backed by notable conservative figures such as Henri Rochefort, Count Arthur Dillon, Alfred Joseph Naquet, Anne de Mortemart-Rochechouart (Duchess of Uzès, who finances him with immense sums), Arthur Meyer, and Paul Déroulède (and his Ligue des Patriotes).

The French Third Republic is rocked by a sudden political crisis precipitated  in 1889 by General Georges Boulanger.

An enormously popular general, he wins a series of elections in which he resigns his seat in the Chamber of Deputies and runs again in another district.

At the apogee of his popularity in January 1889, he poses the threat of a coup d'état and the establishment of a dictatorship.

With his base of support in the working districts of Paris and other cities, plus rural traditionalist Catholics and royalists, he promotes an aggressive nationalism aimed against Germany.

The elections of September 1889 mark a decisive defeat for the Boulangists.

They ae defeated by the changes in the electoral laws that prevent Boulanger from running in multiple constituencies; by the government's aggressive opposition; and by the absence of the general himself, who has placed himself in self-imposed exile to be with his mistress.

The fall of Boulanger severely undermines the political strength of the conservative and royalist elements within France; they will not recover their strength until 1940.

Revisionist scholars will argue that the Boulangist movement more often represented elements of the radical left rather than the extreme right.

Their work will become part of an emerging consensus that France's radical right is formed in part during the Dreyfus era by men who had been Boulangist partisans of the radical left a decade earlier.

France’s Third Republic survives a mismanaged coup d’etat by its involuntarily-retired war minister, Georges Boulanger, in January 1889.

He runs as a deputy for Paris, and, after an intense campaign, takes the seat with 244,000 votes against the 160,000 of his main adversary.

A coup d'état seems probable and desirable among his supporters. Boulanger had now become a threat to the parliamentary Republic.

Had he immediately placed himself at the head of a revolt he might have effected the coup which many of his partisans had worked for, and might even have governed France; but the opportunity passes with his procrastination on January 27. 

Boulanger decides that it will be better to contest the general election and take power legally.

This, however, gives his enemies the time they need to strike back.

Ernest Constans, the Minister of the Interior, decides to investigate the matter, and attacks the Ligue des Patriotes using the law banning the activities of secret societies.

Shortly afterward the French government issues a warrant for Boulanger's arrest for conspiracy and treasonable activity.

To the astonishment of his supporters, on April 1 he flees Paris before the arrest can be executed, going first to Brussels and then to London.

On April 4 the Parliament strips him of his immunity from prosecution; the French Senate condemns him and his supporters, Rochefort and Count Dillon, for treason, sentencing all three to deportation and confinement.

The Boulangist movement collapses.

A number of scholars will present boulangism as a precursor of fascism.

France's right is based in the old aristocracy, but this new movement is based on mass popular feeling that is national, rather than class-based.

Léon Bourgeois succeeds Jean Antoine Ernest Constans, as French Minister of the Interior, on March 1, 1890.

Bourgeois was born in Paris, and was trained in law.

After holding a subordinate office (1876) in the department of public works, he became successively prefect of the Tarn (1882) and the Haute-Garonne (1885), and then returned to Paris to enter the Ministry of the Interior.

He became Prefect of Police in November 1887 at the critical moment of Jules Grévy's resignation from the presidency.

In the following year, he entered the Chamber, being elected deputy for the Marne, in opposition to George Boulanger, and joined the Radical Left.

He was undersecretary for Home Affairs in Charles Floquet's ministry of 1888 and resigned with it in 1889, being then returned to the chamber for Reims.

In Pierre Tirard's ministry, which succeeded, he was Minister of the Interior, and subsequently, on 18 March 1890, Minister of Public Instruction in the cabinet of Charles Louis de Saulces de Freycinet, a post for which he had qualified himself by the attention he had given to educational matters.

In this capacity, he will be responsible for some important reforms in secondary education in 1890.

Bourgeois is Jewish.