General Georges Boulanger was a French military officer and politician whose peaceful bid for power in the late 1880s was the French Third Republic's "most serious peacetime challenge," in the words of historian Robert Tombs. A monumentally interesting and overlooked figure, Boulanger was defeated in part through his own personal failings, in part by his failure to build a political movement that transcended his own person, and in part by the belated wagon-circling of establishment republicans who were (and this is key) unafraid to play dirty to beat him.

The moment of crisis came at a time when France was disunited, with a political spectrum running from far-left revolutionaries to far-right monarchists, barely held together by an unstable centrist coalition of left- and right-wing republicans.

The 1880s added to this volatile mix political corruption, which discredited establishment powers and forced the resignation of the country's president. All the major political figures were too controversial to win a majority in parliament (which chose the president). To escape this gridlock, French deputies compromised by instead choosing a mediocrity: Sadi Carnot, the undistinguished grandson of famed Revolutionary genius Lazare Carnot. “He’s not very bright, but he has a republican name,” quipped Georges Clemenceau.

Of humbler stock and bolder character was Boulanger, the son of a provincial lawyer who idolized Napoleon I and joined the army as soon as he could. There he distinguished himself for his courage, good fortune and excellent horsemanship, and later through bold action in the field in Algeria, Italy, and Paris itself (against both Germans and communards). He also demonstrated a knack for self-promotion and ideological flexibility: a secret police report said he had a reputation in the barracks as an "ardent clerical" even as he was forging politically advantageous ties to left-wing politicians like Clemenceau and Léon Gambetta, which earned him promotions: to general in 1880, and then to the army's Inspector of Infantry two years later. There Boulanger proved himself both a bold reformer and an outspoken nationalist.

These were popular positions and Boulanger continued to milk this popularity and his political connections to rise, being appointed to command France's army in Tunisia in 1884 and then minister of war in 1886. One of his defeated rivals described Boulanger's character thusly:

[Boulanger's] chief attribute is his savoir-faire. He needed it to reach the position he holds at his age, but he lacks a cultivated mind. He has no conversation, either. You feel that here is a man who has read little, thought little about higher things and who has no wide-ranging ideas. His whole mind is bent towards advancement and personal politics. Never under any circumstances have I heard him express an idea or an opinion about what should be done out here. He is quite indifferent to it all.

While probably apt, none of this posed the slightest obstacle to Boulanger's continued rise. For one thing, his peacetime military reforms were genuinely important: against fierce opposition, he eliminated widespread exemptions from nominally compulsory military service while also shortening the term of service from five years to three and making army life "considerably less squalid" with such improvements as mattresses instead of straw pallets and better food and uniforms. More substantively, he helped introduce a new rifle; more symbolically, he let soldiers grow beards (a liberty he promptly took advantage of).

For another thing, the dominant political mood was revanche, a roiling popular resentment against Germany for the humiliation and annexations of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War. Boulanger, dashing on horseback, put himself at the head of this chauvinistic revival, and duly benefitted when Otto von Bismarck publicly warned that Boulanger was likely to provoke another war with Germany. Establishment politicians were far more cautious, and Boulanger soon became sweepingly popular, with more than 370 songs written about him in three years and newfangled photographs framed over mantles across the country. He was dubbed Général Revanche, or General Revenge.

This rising popularity caused some of his erstwhile patrons to reconsider. "There's something about you that appeals to the crowd," Clemenceau warned Boulanger. "That's the temptation. That's the danger I want you to guard against."

But Boulanger was made for the spotlight, and did not pull back. A charismatic chimera, the politically disaffected from all sides gazed on Boulanger and saw in General Revenge their ticket to power. Thus began to form "Boulangisme," an inchoate political movement built around Boulanger and a sort of reflexive anti-establishmentarianism. In Tombs' words, it was "a new and heady combination of Left and Right: a tawdry mixture of the intrigue of ambitious radicals, the revolutionary nostalgia of aging Blanquists, the desperate cynicism of failed royalists, and the weekend jingoism of Parisian office-boys." The fact that the communists and monarchists who rallied to Boulanger agreed on little else mattered little — they had the same enemy, moderate parliamentarism. In Boulanger they saw what they wanted to see and assumed that it was their fellow-travelers who were the dupes. (Others were not taken in but saw Boulanger as a worthwhile gamble. The Bonapartist pretender, Jérôme, met clandestinely with Boulanger and promised to give the general Napoleon's sword if he recovered Alsace and Lorraine. "He has all that is needed to succeed, but nothing of what he needs to stay the course," Jérôme confided to a secretary.)

Continued in Part 2