The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered

The most serious threat to the stability of France's Third Republic was General Boulanger's bid for power in 1888-89. Most recent scholarship of the Boulanger Affair has focused on the combination of socialism and national chauvinism in the movement supporting Boulanger's campaign, and has seen in this alliance the left-wing origins of twentieth-century fascism. William Irvine challenges that analysis, arguing that it was royalist and conservative support which provided the crucial financial and electoral backing to the Boulanger movement. This places the origins of the exploitation of mass politics by extreme rightists in France much earlier than had previously been supposed. Irvine's book is based on previously unused archive materials, including the private papers of the French royal family, which have only recently been made available to scholars.