Bertrand Joly offers in a fascinating story a new approach to what Boulangism was.
It was climacteric weather. The left was deeply divided; the right, atomized. People were wary of parliamentarians and politicians, who were splashed with scandals. The economic difficulties were great. Republican institutions functioned badly. Under the effect of the development of the big press, the new forms of communication were stunning. On the diplomatic scene, the voice of France seemed inaudible. Some were humming the famous tune of Madame Angot’s Daughtercreated fifteen years earlier:
«It wasn’t worth it,
Certainly not worth it.
To change government.»
Does this remind you of something ? That was one hundred and thirty-six years ago. At the Ministry of War, traditionally entrusted to a soldier, General Georges Boulanger had just been appointed, a veteran of the campaigns in Kabylie, Italy, Cochinchina, the war of 1870 and the crushing of the Paris Commune. . Handsome guy in his uniform. Horseback riding. The day after the parade of July 14, 1886, the singer Paulus sang Coming back from the review :
«My mother-in-law is screaming,
Eyeing the spahis,
Me, I was just admiring
Our brave General Boulanger.»
We know the song: the rise of Boulanger, supported by the Republicans, starting with his former classmate at the Nantes high school, Georges Clemenceau; how he had become in the newspapers the “General Revengewhich one day perhaps would avenge the country of Germany; his electoral victories once, stripped of the frameworks of the army by a worried government, he had obtained the right to present itself in front of the voters; his supporters among the monarchist right which financed him; his refusal to take part in a coup d’etat the day after his election in Paris on January 27, 1889; his suicide, finally, on the grave of his mistress, two years later. You may have in mind Clemenceau’s contemptuous epitaph on his former protege: “He died as he lived, as a second lieutenant“. Boulanger, therefore, whose incompetence and character weaknesses would have made it impossible to carry out the project he had embodied.
Lying and dishonest seducer
In a large book based on an impressive mass of archives and a remarkable mastery of the studies that preceded it, Bertrand Joly retains the framework of this story to better understand what was, politically and socially, the movement to which Georges Boulanger gave his name. And he does so with a view whose topicality will not escape anyone, since it is a question of identifying in the years 1886-1891 the origins of a phenomenon with which we are more than ever struggling: populism.
With authority, and sometimes haughtiness, Joly nuances or greedy its predecessors. No, we cannot reduce Boulangism to the birth certificate of nationalism, whose baptismal certificate would be the Dreyfus affair, as René Rémond thought. No, we cannot make it the French root of fascism, as Zeev Sternhell wanted. Moreover, to see the origins of the “populism(a notion unknown to Boulanger’s contemporaries), Joly does not offer a demonstration of political science but a doubly fascinating story.
Boulangism is exciting because its actors are, often by the very fact of their mediocrity, like that lying, dishonest and immoral seducer that was Boulanger. Moreover, says Joly, it isthere one of the great weaknesses of the movement and one of its main dimensions, the immorality“. The formula is less a value judgment than a key to understanding populism, this movement which, beyond the slogans (and those of the Boulangists were very varied, despite the slogan “dissolution-constituent-revision“), adapts to what its supporters want to hear. From this point of view, Boulangism, as an ideology, does not exist: as Joly shows, it is a later creation of those who needed it to tell their own story, starting with Maurice Barrès.
Erratic positions taken
Boulangism is also fascinating because, following it as closely as possible to the events that ended up constituting it, we realize that it is very far from its legend: not a movement which, born on the left, would have evolved towards the right to end up inventing the modern far right – but an identity from the outset constituted by an encounter between the left and the right; not a movement characterized by electoral successes throughout the territory, but an aggregation of victories staged even though they only concerned a small number of supporters (small traders, craftsmen, downgraded civil servants, workers affected by the crisis), as well as a reduced number of constituencies, leaving out a large part of the country; not a body of doctrine, but erratic positions taken according to events.
Remains a style, made of innovative propaganda, media agitation and crystallization on the name of an individual. A style which, in its legend, based on the appeal to the people and the providential incarnation, even in a mediocre and lying character, can only exist with the imagination of the coup d’etat. Facing him, the most resolute opposition remains confidence in the forces of reason.