France in the 19th century : Third Republic in 1890's

The first serious test of the Third Republic’s resiliency was the Boulanger affair, which followed a series of financial scandals that discredited the government. In the late 1880s a rising career soldier, General Georges Boulanger, launched a political career on the basis of his popularity as military reformer. In a highly nationalistic age, his campaign drew wide support, and radicals such as Georges Clemenceau initially thought he might serve as a charismatic figure on behalf of the left.

Increasingly however, Boulanger flirted with the right, calling for drastic revisions to the constitution. He rallied elements of the French population who were dissatisfied with the Third Republic and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. As his movement gained strength, the government threatened to arrest him. In 1889 Boulanger fled to Belgium, where two years later he committed suicide on the grave of his mistress. Although the Boulanger affair now appears something of a farce, it seriously threatened the Third Republic, and its resolution proved a political windfall to the center. Still more serious was the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s. Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish career army captain working in military intelligence. In 1894 he was arrested, court-martialed, convicted, and sent to Devil’s Island for espionage on behalf of Germany. Convinced of his innocence, his family tried unsuccessfully to reopen the apparently closed case. However, military secrets continued to pass to the Germans, and a military investigator, Colonel Georges Picquart, found evidence showing that Major Marie Charles Esterhazy was guilty instead. The army called Picquart off the case, but information about it began to seep out to the public.

Center-left newspapers gradually adopted Dreyfus’s cause as their own, and Esterhazy was brought to trial. He was acquitted in 1898, but by then it was becoming clear that the army had framed Dreyfus. In perhaps the most famous newspaper editorial ever published, “J’accuse” (“I Accuse”), the great novelist and Dreyfus supporter Émile Zola denounced the army for its deceptions. Controversy gripped the nation and the world as Dreyfus became a symbol of the secular Third Republic itself. Ordinary citizens chose sides according to their politics. In defending Dreyfus’s innocence, the center-left saw itself refighting the battles of the French Revolution in favor of liberty and against the aristocracy and the church. Led by many anti-Semitic monarchists in the church and the army, the right argued that Dreyfus had to be regarded as guilty, or the army, and by extension the nation, would fall into disgrace or worse.

In 1899 a new military court met and convicted Dreyfus, now an emaciated walking skeleton, for a second time.

To resolve the controversy, the president of the republic offered Dreyfus a pardon. Dreyfus accepted it only with reluctance, because it implied a guilt that he had always denied. In 1906 an appeals court cleared Dreyfus officially of all charges. The army refused to admit it had framed Dreyfus, but he was nonetheless reinstated. The right continued to believe in Dreyfus’s guilt long after the great affair was over.

The Dreyfus case inflated the political sails of the Radicals, who pressed on with their campaign against the church and in 1905 disestablished it altogether. The church vigorously resisted disestablishment, and as a result, its income declined seriously, as did entries into the priesthood and attendance at church schools. Disestablishment also freed the church from many compromising political entanglements. Ultimately it may have improved the quality of the clergy because only the more dedicated were willing to accept lower salaries. In any case, the church henceforth became a much less important source of political controversy. Another effect of the Dreyfus affair was to galvanize and reorient the right, which had begun to change even earlier.

Dreyfus.

This “new right” mixed its pleas on behalf of monarchy and the church with a new, shrill nationalism, opposition to parliamentary government, and anti-Semitism. It used these tenets effectively in its campaign against Dreyfus. The new right learned how to mobilize public opinion through journalism and how to organize political campaigns, two abilities that prepared the way for the fascist leagues of the post-World War I era. Encarta