Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Boulanger Affair: Political Crossroad of France, 1886-1889 by

Frederic H. Seager
Review by: Eugen Weber
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1970), pp. 424-428
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1905892
Accessed: 10-04-2020 14:31 UTC

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424 Book Reviews

utilized his contacts at court to try to influence the ruler, opposed the
policies of his superiors in dispatches and letters, and longed to climb into
the driver's seat. Like Arnim, he kept official documents on his departure
from office and made disclosures designed to embarrass his successors
and demonstrate the superiority of his own judgment. What he did not
share with Arnim made all the difference-a naive miscalculation of his
opponent and the degree of his own vulnerability.
OTTO PFLANZE
University of Minnesota

The Boulanger Affair: Political Crossroad of France, 1886-1889. By Fred-

eric H. Seager.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. Pp. xvi+276. $8.00.

Georges Boulanger was born in 1837 at Rennes, in Brittany, the son of

a Republican lawyer, and educated at the same time as Clemenceau at
the lycee of Nantes. He entered the army, served in a long series of cam-
paigns-Algeria, Italy, Cochinchina, against the Prussians in 1870, against
the Communards in 1871-often wounded, always very brave. He grew
a beard, which his fellow officers took as an attempt to show off and set
himself apart. In 1884 he became the youngest general in the French
army. In January 1886 he was minister of war, his presence in the cabinet
due to a coalition between moderate opportunitists and less moderate
radicals. Signalizing himself by a number of democratic measures in the
army itself and by a demagogically anti-German stance, Boulanger quickly
became the symbol of a patriotic reformism that soon turned against the
established order, against the government, even against the Republic as it
then stood.
The crowds cheered him at reviews. Chansonniers made up songs
about him. The centrists disapproved of him. The organized Left, which
had begun by supporting him, became scared of his recklessness and
gradually turned away. The general, eliminated from office in May 1887,
placed on the retired list a year later, became the center of a coalition of
the dissatisfied, backed by mavericks of both Left and Right, sustained
by legitimist money, admired by "little people" of all parties. In 1888, a
series of plebiscite-like by-elections proved his popularity and the efficiency
of the machine that backed him. It seemed to some as if the Republic
was running into danger. But the bubble danger did not last. Off his
black horse, the handsome general revealed himself unintelligent and,
what was worse, ineffective. Jules Ferry was right to dub him "un Saint
Arnaud de caf6 concert": he did not have the temperament of a putschist.
Nor could he match his opponents in debate: at his age, Charles Floquet
taunted him, Napoleon was already dead. The remark was no less in-
sulting for being incorrect by several months. Boulanger's reply was
to challenge the irreverent radical to a duel and get himself impaled on
his opponent's sword. Even so, his popularity survived and grew. To get rid
of him, the Republic had recourse to meaner measures. Groundlessly it
indicted him, and foolishly he fled the danger of arrest and trial. Ap-

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 Book Reviews 425

propriately, on April 1, 1889, the general went into exile, to be condemned

in absentia for plotting treason he had never dreamed.
Boulanger never saw France again. His movement fell to pieces, so
did his finances, so did his life when his mistress (who had helped to
keep him) died in summer 1891. A few weeks later, in September 1891,
the general committed suicide on her tomb near Brussels. Like Pauline,
the Republic was safe-until the next time. But the memory of Boulanger's
meteoric passage and the resentments born or sharpened during those
years would affect French politics for a good while longer.
This is the story Professor Seager tells or, rather, reexamines and
interprets in order to dispel the misconceptions with which it has become
incrusted. He does well to do so, and he does it well. In the process he dispels
a few persistent myths. Thus, he tells us, Boulanger and his followers did
not err in not failing to march on the Elys6e and to stage a coup on the night
of their great electoral triumph in Paris. (They never envisaged a coup; they
meant to win by electoral means.) Seager also reminds us that French
nationalism, still inspired by Jacobin tradition, continued in Boulanger's
day as a preserve of the Left. Thus Boulanger's demagogic patriotism
was an appeal inspired by and directed to the Left, and his movement, as
the author insists, "never ceased to be oriented towards the Left" (p.
100). Its first recruits were dissident radicals, its stalwarts were ex-Com-
munards and Jacobin leftists, the first editor of the Boulangist Cocarde
in 1888 was an anarchist. Even in the elections of 1889 radical voters,
when put to it, preferred to cast their ballots for Boulangists rather than
opportunists. "Blood-red Clignancourt" gave the outlawed exile a vast
majority (invalidated, of course) (p. 236). True, Jules Guesde had al-
ways opposed him, urging the electors of the Nord to vote for the gen-
eral's horse instead (some did). But socialists elsewhere ran on the Boulang-
ist ticket, and in Bordeaux alone three of them got elected that way.
It is a fact that the bulk of Boulangist votes came from royalists and
Bonapartists (probably because the Left divided and the Right, for once,
did not). But the hard core of Boulangism "was drawn from artisans
and industrial workers," interested not in getting a dictator but in "a better
sort of Republic, more responsive to their needs" (p. 4). What this meant
is harder to say than what it did not mean. But the latter is interesting
enough. One thing it did not mean was a falling back on providential
saviors. For Seager, it is nonsense to attribute Boulanger's success to some
special French predilection for men on horseback (and then go on to
prove that view by reference to Boulanger's success). On Seager's seismo-
graph, "the Boulanger affair" appears as a rather serious but natural
tremor: a slip of the geological fault created by ill-adjusted parliamentary
institutions. I shall return to this.
Seager also rejects any identification of Boulangism with Bonapartism.
He effectively quotes Paul Lafargue writing to Engels that, in the cir-
cumstances and relative to his enemies, "Boulanger is the man of the
people," aiming not at a coup d'7tat but at revolution. For Seager, the
events of 1888 are a "popular revolt" and Boulangism in no way "a form
of latent Caesarism." Far from this, the movement's final goal was to set
up a more democratic republic (pp. 171, 259, 254).

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426 Book Reviews

Had it said just this, Seager's work would have been welcome for the
provocative and documented footnotes it provides to a chapter of nine-
teenth-century history. But there is more to his book, sometimes explicit,
sometimes less so. I hope I shall not misinterpret him or go beyond his
meaning in what follows.
Immediately speaking, Seager places Boulanger in the context of a
fluctuating and unsettled political situation where, in the mid-1880s, the
important group of the Orleanist Right was beginning to move toward
some sort of ralliement to the republic but had not yet reached that crucial
point. The Orleanists' failure to create a Republican Right, a real con-
servative party, meant that the opportunists of the center were forced
into a temporary alliance with the Left-that is, mostly, with the radicals
-with whom they had little in common beyond republicanism, far less
than they had with the Orleanists. But the center needed allies to govern
and, failing to find partners on the center-Right, was forced to turn to
fellow Republicans. This left the Right available for extraparliamentary
or antirepublican adventures. If the Orleanists had been true to their
interests rather than to their ideas (which they would shortly abandon),
none of this would have happened. Perhaps it took the Boulangist crisis to
show them that. Meanwhile, the opportunists had to collaborate with
radicals (which brought Boulanger into the government), and then got
scared of Boulanger's kind of radicalism (which sent Boulanger into the
wilderness to meet and collaborate with the Right).
For the latter, Boulanger was always "an instrument," as one of their
papers openly called him. They hoped to benefit from his leftist following.
Boulangists, on the other hand, hoped that right-wing votes added to their
own would give them a majority. Seager himself believes that, had Bou-
langer's successes continued, a coalition of royalists and Boulangists might
have won a majority in the elections of 1889. One wonders what they
would have done with it. For the moment, they talked of revising the
constitution: the Orleanists because they contested the form of govern-
ment, the Boulangists because they thought that the monarchist constitution
of 1875 obnubilated universal suffrage and true national consensus. The
superficial coincidence of their views made the alliance possible. The fact
that the call for revision was a criticism of parliament and its operations
made it more popular. When Boulanger claimed that "the Chamber has
become completely alien to the aspirations of the country," he sounded
convincing. Parliament did not impress many as either effective or rep-
resentative.
But constitutional reform was a doubtful remedy. Already the Third
Republic was caught on a lasting dilemma. Electoral results expressed
majorities of the Left and Right, while political power rested with a Center
that apparently represented no more than a minority. Political stability
was achieved at the cost of representative and responsive government.
The country grew dissatisfied with institutions whose very functioning
seemed to prove their failure. Parliamentary stalemate encouraged extra.
parliamentary protest. It also encouraged occasional alliances of ends
against the middle, natural and yet unnatural, and by their very nature
threatening subversion. It is on such an alliance that Seager's story turns.

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 Book Reviews 427

Against this background, Boulanger is demoted to an epiphenom-

enon. Doubly so, for his meteoric rise to national popularity in 1887
appears as the result of certain Bismarckian maneuvers designed to get a
military bill through the Reichstag; while his successes of 1888-89 are the
outcome of conditions where "chronic discontent bred a chronic protest
vote" (p. 3).
Going a step further, Boulangism developed at a time, in the 1880s,
when the deferential politics of previous decades began to be challenged
by the growing political significance of middle- and lower-middle-class
radicals, and even by socialist activity. The popular electorate became
a factor in the calculations of all political factions. In this changing con-
text, opportunist politicians represented a Republique des Notables that
was receding almost as swiftly as that of the Ducs it had displaced. Electoral
successes came to depend increasingly on sections of the electorate pre-
viously unheeded. Even the Right would seek to enlist a popular following,
and the experience of 1888-89 would show them how to go about it. It was
because the opportunists would not or could not learn that they were fated
to extinction. Meanwhile, alliance with Boulanger offered the opportunity
of capturing what Severine (mistress of La Cocarde's editor) called "the
irresolute and floating mass." For Boulangist campaigns and campaign
funds were way ahead of all competitors. Reflecting on the general's un-
heard-of fortune in some articles he penned for the Gironde, a future
foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, attributed it to "a new element with
which politics would have to count from now on: "American-style publicity."
Not denying the importance of the machine run by a Saint-Cyr class-
mate of Boulanger's who had returned from the United States with a large
fortune and an even greater admiration for American advertising tech-
niques, one can note more straightforward factors. Boulanger's campaign
arguments, simple and forceful, combining national and social appeals,
foreshadow the democratic campaigns of our own time. And Seager dis-
cerns as Boulanger's chief accomplishment (though not a lasting one)
the creation in France of a mass movement on modern lines.
It is worth adding that, by combining "nationalism in foreign affairs,
an ill-defined desire for social progress," and an equally ill-defined faith in
universal suffrage (p. 249), the Boulangist program was ushering in a long
procession of similar Populist programs. It also made possible the transfer
of nationalism from the political armory of the Left to that of the Right.
The transfer would not become evident or effective until the Dreyfus affair.
But here, a decade before the Rennes trial, patriotism ceases to be apolitical,
Deroulede's Ligue des patriotes (sponsored by responsible Republicans only
a few years before) becomes a vehicle for Boulangism, and patriotism turns
into a political issue.
Thus, spawned by discontent, Boulangism was destined to sow the
dragons' teeth of further discontents. The hopes briefly placed in Bou-
langer soon vanished, but the grievances he represented remained. Yet
politics is an unending series of second bests, and there is no reason to
believe that a Boulangist success would have been preferable to what
actually happened.
The author himself concludes that, far from marking the republic's

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428 Book Reviews

weakness, the Boulangist experience-a mere crise de croissance-signal-

led its growing strength. With the republic no longer in serious danger,
radicals and other leftists felt free to attack the opportunists; while
royalists and Bonapartists were tempted to challenge the regime under the
Republican colors of Boulangism rather than their own. The regime was
no longer a national issue, though it remained a regional one. The eco-
nomic system had not yet become an issue, except for the socialists who
carried little weight. In the circumstances, politics were an affair of ideas,
of formulas, vehicles of self-affirmation and self-advancement for members
of the privileged classes, not unlike literature or art.
Politics on a national scale, as a matter of who gets what and who
sacrifices what, was not yet. But it was about to be. Like the socialism of
those years, Boulangism was a forest murmur announcing coming storms,
the advent of a second political revolution, the rise of those nouvelles
couches sociales whose coming to power would in due course elicit other
contenders still.
EUGEN WEBER
University of California, Los Angeles

The Liberal Party and the Jameson Raid. By Jeffrey Butler.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Pp. xii+336. $7.00

The Last Liberal Government: The Promised Land, 1905-1910. By Peter

Rowland.
New York: Macmillan Co., 1969. Pp. xviii+404. $8.95.
Whether to mourn or to gloat, scholars have been attracted in ever greater
numbers to the history of British liberalism in decline. When since that
time have politicians of such commanding intellect and high principle pre-
sided over their nation's affairs? When since has it been possible to believe,
as prewar Liberals did so ardently, in theories of progress and the funda-
mental reason of man? "Distance invariably lends enchantment," Peter
Rowland has observed, "and the years immediately preceding 1914 have
come to be wistfully regarded as the sunshine days of the twentieth cen-
tury."
"Strange" or otherwise, the death of Liberal England was long in
coming. Late-Victorian and Edwardian Liberals betrayed a curious in-
ability to contend with the social and political conditions they had helped
to create. Fissures began to ripple across the Liberal surface even while
W. E. Gladstone had remained at the helm; with his belated retirement
in 1894, leadership struggles exacerbated ideological divisions. As Peter
Stansky has written in his incisive account of Liberal Ambitions and
Strategies ([Oxford, 1964], p. 176), by mid-decade the Liberals "were
becoming known as the party of faddists, a collection of cranks, each
with his own cure for the ills of the nation": Home Rule, Welsh dis-
establishment, workmen's compensation, temperance, House of Lords re-
form. Party unity was reduced to a fiction, party organization to a nullity.
So it remained into the new century. Despite the freak recovery that
awaited them at the polls in January 1906, when they faced a party even
more divided than they, the Liberals never fused into a viable tactical force

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