Popular Boulangism and the Advent of Mass Politics in France, 1886–90

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The history of the Boulangist movement has long been written as the saga of General Georges Boulanger, an ambitious army officer, who led an unsuccessful campaign to revise the Constitution of the Third French Republic.1 Only recently has interest shifted from the man to his movement, to a consideration of the nature of Boulanger's appeal to his sizeable and enthusiastic popular following. The pioneering work upon this subject is the study by Jacques Nere, who seeks to establish a relationship between popular Boulangism and the turbulent world of labour protest in the 1880s.2 Nere argues that the Boulangist crisis was the direct issue of an economic depression, whose scope is revealed in the high levels of unemployment in cities through France during that decade. For Nere, the coherence of the Boulangist movement was founded upon the popular response to declining opportunities for employment, a crisis upon which the moderate Republican government turned an indifferent eye. As the first expression since the Commune of the 'Jacobin' alliance of radical republican leadership and urban popular following, the Boulangist movement rekindled the sentiments of patriotism, egalitarianism and popular vigilance with which the revolutionary movement in France had traditionally been identified. While N6re's analysis of the forces which created the Boulangist movement is illuminating, it sheds less light upon its consequences for French politics. From this vantage point, the movement is as significant for what it reveals about the process of political change in France in the 1880s as it is for the adventures of Boulanger or the Jacobin ideology of some of his followers. For the decade which drew to a close in the Boulangist crisis was one in which French society was in rapid evolution. The expanding population of the cities, the growing importance of