Boulangist agitation and the consequences of populism

At the origins of populism: History of Boulangism (1886-1891) by Bertrand Joly, CNRS editions, 2022, 610 p.

The Third Republic was born from the instantaneous collapse of the Second Empire following the bitter debacle of Napoleon III before the Prussians at Sedan (September 1870). Humiliated by the amputation of Alsace-Lorraine and belittled before a unified Germany at Versailles in the middle of the occupied country and facing an insurgent and besieged Paris, the Third Republic, reputed to be “business” and “decadent” while expanding to excess overseas in the colonial world, was nevertheless to be able to block in turn turn the designs of a monarchist or Bonapartist restoration and stifle the nostalgic insurrectionary perspectives of past revolutions.

The Third thus had the longest life of all the successive constitutional and political regimes in France since the end of the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, it will have difficulty stemming the frustrations and discontents, fueled by the delirium of “revenge” against Germany, and cemented by a virulent anti-parliamentarianism with multiple layers. The craving for Boulangist agitation that shook this Republic at the end of the 1980s was the crystallization of all these resentments.

Made popular following the military reforms he initiated as Minister of War, General Georges Boulanger, who would be renamed “General Revanche” in the nickname of his adulators, was gathered around his fetish the great party of the discontented after his estrangement from the government and his “internal exile” in the provinces, by strangely blurring the lines of cleavage between the most antagonistic ideological traditions and rallying the two extremes: on the one hand those who plot for some kind of dynastic restoration , and on the other those who wait in vain for the outbreak of a new revolution, drawing their antecedents from the memories of urban sans-culottery, all engulfed in a heterogeneous bloc which could not afford the slightest programmatic synthesis between its components, and which will be ruined by the absurdity of its hopeless agitation against an asocial and hated parliamentary republic, accused of undermining the proud nationality and outrageous flight into colonial extravagance.

As Bertrand Joly points out in this new and masterful History of Boulangism, “Boulanger shot the communards and insulted the royalists; his victims forgive him everything, justify everything”. This is explained, according to Joly, in this devastating and pathological power of hatred in politics, invested by this populist figure in his hesitant and then aborted attempt to seize power.

In Boulangism, Joly identifies an “appeal to the soldier” as well as an “appeal to the crowd”, while being careful not to endorse the image of a “Booted Jacobin” or a “Napoleon of the people”. . As Georges Clemenceau was to say, who was the first to propose Boulanger for a ministerial post and then the first to regret it on realizing that war is “too serious a matter to entrust to soldiers”: “The popularity of General Boulanger came too soon to someone who liked noise too much. Indeed, this leading demagogue who was “nothing” in the end, and if he was able to unite all his groups around him, however hostile to each other, it was by lying to all.

Bearer of irremediably irreconcilable protests, this character gifted for communication but of a fundamental intellectual poverty remained in the end “a not very adventurous adventurer”, as described by the Duke de Broglie. On the other hand, he remained more realistic of all his lieutenants and of those who followed him into the fray. He was the first to realize the impasse towards which the agitation was rushing in his name. Popular support for the General “against the big guys” was to remain short-lived and would require little trouble for the “opportunists” and “radicals” of the Third Republic to thwart and disperse it.

Threatened with an arrest warrant, the general chose to flee to Belgium rather than face the ordeal of prison. Bad news for the former devotees of the eternal insurgent that was Auguste Blanqui, known as “the locked up” – because he spent thirty-five years of his life incarcerated –, who became delirious bakers after the death of their master.

The general who will ruin his idol on his own, which in any case remained without a future, will end up committing suicide on September 30, 1891 on the grave of his beloved, rightly receiving this scathing joke from Clemenceau: “He died as he lived: as a second lieutenant. »

The meticulous archival work on which Joly’s history of Boulangist populism is based is also bitterly polemical. It is a question of rejecting the interpretation given by the historian of ideas Zeev Sternhell of Boulangism as a prefiguration of fascism, namely a nationalism of the left which has veered towards the extreme right. However, it is above all the adhesion of the young Maurice Barrès to Boulangism which serves as a frame of reference for Sternhell, since according to him, “authoritarianism, worship of the leader, anti-capitalism, anti-Semitism, a certain revolutionary romanticism, such are the essential elements of Barresian Boulangism. On the other hand, for Joly, Boulangism as such is neither right nor left. Although it mixed supporters of the two extremes, it did not develop its own synthesis of its components and cannot even be placed in the tradition of the “plebiscitary right”, according to the typology of René Rémond for whom Boulangism made mine of a “first reincarnation of Bonapartism in a republican regime”. Together, Joly underscores the absurdity of depicting two moments in Boulangism, one embodying class-based social purity and another perverted by the lies of the leader and the financing of the monarchists.

Blaming Karl Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, for his initial enthusiasm for this “popular movement”, Friedrich Engels did not refrain from expressing his optimism following the discredit of Boulangism. Finally, the way for a socialist movement has been cleared in France, he said. Joly’s book is not really there, and concentrates instead on demonstrating the opposite effect of Boulangism in relation to its intentions: that is, that it ultimately contributed to strengthening the consensus between the moderates and radicals of the Republic by making its constitutional revision impossible, thus causing its extension over time.