Georges Ernest Boulanger
Georges Ernest Boulanger spent the night of the 27th of January 1889 not staging a coup, but searching for a woman. According to Lady Randolph Churchill, "all his thoughts were centered in and controlled by her who was the mainspring of his life." A plebiscite had just seemed to hand him the country. Yet, in her words, "he rushed off to Madame Bonnemain's house and could not be found." His followers stood ready and eager for him to seize power that same night. He did nothing.
His base of support ran through the working-class districts of Paris and other cities. It also ran through rural Catholics and royalist sympathizers who saw in him a common cause. At the height of his fame in that same January, the French government itself feared he was capable of making himself dictator. How did a career soldier reach that kind of following? What political program turned one general into a mass movement? And why did that movement collapse so quickly that historians still argue over which side of the political spectrum it truly belonged to?
Boulanger was born on the 29th of April 1837 in Rennes, Brittany, the youngest of three children. His father, Ernest Boulanger, was a lawyer in Bourg-des-Comptes. His mother, Mary-Ann Webb Griffith, came from a Welsh aristocratic family, the Griffiths of Burton Agnes, and had been born in Bristol. His older brother Ernest enlisted in the Union Army during the American Civil War and was killed in action. After attending the Lycée of Nantes, Boulanger entered the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1855 and joined the French Army the following year.
He first saw combat in 1857 in Kabylia, during the French conquest of Algeria. In the Austro-Sardinian War he was wounded at Robecchetto con Induno and received the Légion d'honneur. He later served in the Cochinchina campaign, then returned to Saint-Cyr as a captain and instructor. During the Franco-Prussian War his bravery earned him a promotion to chef de bataillon. He was wounded again at Champigny-sur-Marne, during the siege of Paris. In the spring of 1871, Boulanger was among the Third Republic officers who crushed the Paris Commune. He took a third wound while leading troops toward the Panthéon. Patrice de MacMahon promoted him to commander of the Légion d'honneur. The promotion was soon reversed, since it had only been provisional, and his protest resignation was refused.
The Duke of Aumale, Henri d'Orléans, backed Boulanger's promotion to brigadier-general in 1880. Two years later, War Minister Jean-Baptiste Billot named him director of infantry at the war office. There he built a reputation as a reformer focused on morale and efficiency. In 1884 he rose to general of division and took command of the army occupying Tunisia. He was recalled after clashing with the political resident, Pierre-Paul Cambon. Back in Paris, he entered politics under Georges Clemenceau and the Radicals. In January 1886, when Charles de Freycinet formed a government, Clemenceau helped secure Boulanger's appointment as War Minister, replacing Jean-Baptiste Campenon. Clemenceau assumed Boulanger was a republican because he was known to skip Mass. Boulanger would soon reveal himself as a conservative and a monarchist instead.
Allowing soldiers to grow beards was one of the reforms Boulanger introduced as Minister of War, the post that made him truly popular. He also put down a major workers' strike in Decazeville. His appeals to French desire for revenge against Imperial Germany soon earned him a new nickname, Général Revanche, General Revenge.
A scandal broke when Philippe, comte de Paris, the Orléanist claimant to the French throne, married his daughter Amélie to Carlos I of Portugal in a lavish wedding. The wedding stoked fears of anti-Republican ambitions among monarchists. The French parliament quickly passed a law expelling all potential claimants to the crown from French territory. Boulanger, now war minister, had to inform his own patron and mentor, the Duke of Aumale, that Aumale himself was being expelled from the army. Public adulation followed the Sino-French War, when France's victory brought Tonkin into its colonial empire.
In the first five months of 1886, Boulanger pushed for rapid adoption of a new rifle built around Poudre B, a smokeless powder developed two years earlier by P. Vielle. The push backfired. The resulting 8x50mmR Lebel cartridge became a powerful high-velocity round, but its double taper and rim handicapped French firearm design for decades. The Lebel Model 1886 rifle itself was a strengthened version of the Kropatschek design from the late 1870s. It became obsolete faster than the magazine rifles other European armies adopted through the late 1880s and 1890s. Before Boulanger's intervention, the French military had planned to adopt a more modern design. He also ordered a million rifles built by May 1887, a target his own plan could not realistically meet.
When Freycinet's government fell in December, René Goblet kept Boulanger at the war office. Confident of his support, the general began provoking Germany directly. He ordered military facilities built at Belfort, banned horse exports to German markets, and even blocked performances of Lohengrin. Germany answered in February 1887 by calling up more than 70,000 reservists. War was narrowly averted after the Schnaebele incident in April 1887, and Boulanger's supporters credited him with facing down Bismarck. For Goblet's government, though, Boulanger had become a liability, and he clashed openly with Foreign Minister Émile Flourens. On the 17th of May, Goblet was voted out and replaced by Maurice Rouvier. Rouvier dismissed Boulanger from the war ministry on the 30th of May.
The French government was astonished when Boulanger received around 100,000 votes in a partial election in Seine, without even being a candidate. He was pulled out of the Paris region and posted to Clermont-Ferrand as commander of the troops stationed there. When he left Paris on the 8th of July, a crowd of ten thousand stormed the Gare de Lyon. They covered his train with posters reading Il reviendra, 'He will come back,' and blocked the tracks. He was ultimately smuggled out of the station anyway.
Boulanger built his own movement around three principles: revanche, revenge on Germany; révision, revision of the constitution; and restauration, restoration of the monarchy. Supporters and opponents alike came to call it Boulangisme. Prominent conservative figures backed him almost immediately, among them Count Arthur Dillon, Alfred Joseph Naquet, Arthur Meyer, and Paul Déroulède with his Ligue des Patriotes. The Duchess of Uzès, Anne de Rochechouart de Mortemart, financed the movement with immense sums of money.
Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of President Jules Grévy, was caught secretly selling Légion d'honneur medals, handing Boulanger a political opening. The scandal discredited the Republican government, while Boulanger's popularity rose in contrast. Grévy was forced to resign, and in January 1888 the boulangistes promised to back any presidential candidate who would in turn make Boulanger War Minister. The crisis ended with the election of Sadi Carnot as president and Pierre Tirard as Prime Minister. Tirard refused to give Boulanger a place in his cabinet. During this period Boulanger was in Switzerland, meeting Prince Napoléon-Jérôme Bonaparte, who offered the cause his full support. Even the Comte de Paris urged his own followers to back Boulanger. On the 26th of March 1888, Boulanger was expelled from the army; the very next day, Daniel Wilson had his prison sentence overturned. To the French public it looked as though honest generals were punished while corrupt politicians went free, and Boulanger's popularity climbed higher still.
French law barred military men from standing for the Chamber of Deputies, but Boulanger ran anyway, in seven separate départements during 1888. Bonapartist money backed his campaign, and Boulangiste candidates stood in every département in France. He and his allies won seats, and on the 12th of July a large crowd accompanied them to their swearing-in. Boulanger himself was elected in the constituency of Nord. Boulangistes remained a minority in the Chamber. Unable to pass legislation, Boulanger focused instead on maintaining his public image. Neither his weak record as a public speaker, nor a lost duel against Charles Thomas Floquet, cooled his supporters' enthusiasm. Floquet, an elderly civilian, then held both the premiership and the Interior Ministry.
During 1888, Boulanger's personality dominated French politics. When he resigned his seat to protest the Chamber's treatment of his proposals, multiple constituencies competed to elect him again. The popular song C'est Boulanger qu'il nous faut, 'Boulanger Is the One We Need,' carried his name into households across the country. He and his black horse became idols of the Parisian public. Urged to run for the presidency, he agreed, but his personal ambition soon alienated republican supporters who recognized in him a potential military dictator. Monarchists kept funding him regardless, even though Boulanger saw himself as a leader in his own right rather than a restorer of kings.
In January 1889, Boulanger ran for a Paris seat and won it after an intense campaign, taking 244,000 votes against 160,000 for his main rival. Rather than seize power outright, he chose to contest the coming general election and take power through legal means. That choice gave his enemies the time they needed. Ernest Constans, the Minister of the Interior, opened an investigation and moved against the Ligue des Patriotes under a law banning secret societies.
On the 1st of April, an arrest warrant against him for conspiracy and treason was about to be carried out. To the astonishment of his own supporters, Boulanger fled Paris, first to Brussels and then to London. On the 4th of April, Parliament stripped him of his immunity from prosecution. The French Senate then condemned Boulanger, along with his allies Rochefort and Count Dillon, sentencing all three to deportation and confinement for treason.
The Boulangists were defeated in the general elections of July 1889, once the government had barred Boulanger from running. Support for him had already been dwindling since his flight abroad.
In 1890, Le Figaro caused a sensation by alleging that Boulanger's London promoter, Alexander Meyrick Broadley, had taken him and Rochefort to a brothel. It was the same brothel at the center of the Cleveland Street scandal. Dillon was forced to publicly deny the claim.
Boulanger went to live in Jersey. In September 1891, he returned to the Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels. There he shot himself in the head, on the grave of his mistress, Madame de Bonnemains, born Marguerite Brouzet. She had died in his arms the previous July. He was buried in the same grave.
The September 1889 elections handed the Boulangists a crushing defeat. New electoral rules now barred any candidate, Boulanger included, from standing in more than one constituency at once. Combined with fierce opposition from the sitting government and Boulanger's own self-imposed exile abroad, those new rules drove the movement into rapid collapse.
Conservative and royalist forces in France would not recover real strength until the Vichy regime took power in 1940. That is a measure of how badly the Boulangist collapse had weakened them. In the meantime, a long stretch of political dominance by the Moderate Republicans followed the Boulangists' defeat.
Historians trace much of that failure back to Boulanger's own character. He had charisma to spare. But scholars describe him as lacking coolness, consistency, and decisiveness. They judge him a mediocre leader without real vision or courage. He proved unable to hold together a coalition running from the far left to the far right. That range of support was exactly what had carried him to prominence in the first place. He did leave one lasting mark: he frightened French republicans badly enough that they reorganized and closed ranks against him.
Zeev Sternhell is among the scholars who classify the Boulangist movement as an early, right-wing form of fascism.
France's traditional right had long rested on the Catholic Church and on noble families whose ancestors had survived the Reign of Terror. Boulanger's movement broke that mold. It drew on a mass, populist following that was national in character rather than tied to religion or class. Historian Jacques Néré took the argument further, writing that "Boulangism was first and foremost a popular movement of the extreme left." Irvine, while granting Boulanger drew some royalist backing, concluded the movement is "better understood as the coalescence of the fragmented forces of the Left." Both readings feed into a broader consensus. France's radical right, shaped during the Dreyfus affair, was partly built by men who had been Far Left Boulangist partisans a decade earlier.
Boulanger's coalition even included former Communards from the Paris Commune and supporters of Blanquism, a faction within the Central Revolutionary Committee. Among them were Victor Jaclard, Ernest Granger, and Henri Rochefort.
In 1956, director Jean Renoir drew on Boulanger's political rise and fall for his film Elena and Her Men, a musical fantasy. Jean Marais played the Boulanger-inspired character, a general named François Rollan.
According to IMDb, French television also revisited the story in the early 1980s with Nuit du général Boulanger, 'General Boulanger's Night.' In it, actor Maurice Ronet played the general.
Guy de Maupassant took a darker angle in his short story The Magic Couch. There, Boulanger is credited with authorizing the creation of the 'Suicide Bureau,' reportedly 'the only good thing he did.' Maurice Leblanc gave him one last brief mention, in his 1924 novel The Countess of Cagliostro.
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Common questions
Who was Georges Ernest Boulanger?
Georges Ernest Boulanger was a French Army officer and politician who lived from the 29th of April 1837 to the 30th of September 1891. He became enormously popular during the Third Republic and was known by the nickname General Revenge, Général Revanche, for his calls for revenge against Germany.
Why was Georges Ernest Boulanger nicknamed General Revenge?
Georges Ernest Boulanger earned the nickname Général Revanche, General Revenge, because of his appeals to French desire for revenge against Imperial Germany while serving as Minister of War. Supporters came to see him as the man destined to deliver that revenge.
What happened to Georges Ernest Boulanger's political movement in 1889?
Georges Ernest Boulanger's movement, known as Boulangisme, suffered a decisive defeat in the elections of September 1889. New electoral laws barred him from running in multiple constituencies at once, and combined with government opposition and his own self-imposed exile, the movement collapsed rapidly.
Why did Georges Ernest Boulanger flee France in 1889?
Georges Ernest Boulanger fled Paris on the 1st of April 1889 after the government issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of conspiracy and treasonable activity. He went first to Brussels and then to London, and on the 4th of April Parliament stripped him of his immunity from prosecution.
How did Georges Ernest Boulanger die?
Georges Ernest Boulanger died by suicide on the 30th of September 1891, shooting himself in the head at the Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels. He died on the grave of his mistress, Madame de Bonnemains, who had died in his arms the previous July, and he was buried in the same grave.
Was Georges Ernest Boulanger's movement considered left-wing or right-wing?
Georges Ernest Boulanger's movement, Boulangisme, is interpreted differently by historians. Scholars such as Zeev Sternhell describe it as an early right-wing form of fascism, while historians such as Jacques Néré and Irvine argue it was fundamentally a popular movement of the extreme left.
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8 references cited across the entry
- 2BookLes parlementaires de la Seine sous la Troisième RépubliqueJean-Marie Mayeur et al. — University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne — 2001
- 3Des Tranchées MuséeAugust 2022
- 5Georges BoulangerEncyclopædia Britannica
- 6BookNeither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in FranceZeev Sternhell — Princeton UP — 1996
- 7BookThe Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886-1914Robert Lynn Fuller — McFarland — 2012