Europe in the Belle Époque, 1871–1914509institutions of democracy—a public school system that
was free, secular, and compulsory. This legislation
opened secondary schools to women and to children of
the poorer classes. While the population of France in-
creased by less than 8 percent between 1883 and 1913,
secondary school enrollment grew by 106 percent. The
number of girls in secondary education grew from
11,100 to 55,700. The new school system was secular
because republicans recognized that the church re-
mained allied with the monarchy against democracy. As
Gambetta once put it, “Clericalism, there is the enemy.”
Whereas 44 percent of all French children (60 percent
of all girls) were educated by the church in 1876, less
than 1 percent (0.05 percent of all boys) were in 1912.
The same sentiment also led to secular hospitals, civil
marriage and burial, and divorce. Clemenceau cam-
paigned for the separation of church and state, plus
other radical innovations such as an income tax and
welfare legislation (see document 26.1), but most re-
publicans still resisted such reforms.
A conservative reaction against this republicanism
swept France in the late nineteenth century. A popular
minister of war, General Georges Boulanger, became
the symbolic leader of this reaction, and monarchists,
nationalists, and Catholics rallied to “Boulangism,” hop-
ing that he would overthrow the republic. Boulangists
won many seats in Parliament in the late 1880s and
taught the world a lesson in electoral demagoguery, but
the general, fearing conspiracy charges against him,
fled the country and committed suicide. Right-wing en-
emies of the republic resumed the attack in the 1890s,
when several republican politicians were involved in
corruption surrounding a failed French attempt to build
a canal across the isthmus of Panama.
The Panama Canal scandal of 1892–93 awakened
one of the ugliest elements in European antidemocratic
politics, anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism remained wide-
spread in the late nineteenth century, and newspapers
and political parties blatantly called themselves
anti-Semitic. Vienna elected an anti-Semite, Karl
Lueger, as its mayor, and he fired Jewish officials and
segregated the schools. In Germany, an Anti-Semite
Party elected deputies to the Reichstag in every elec-
tion from 1887 to 1912 and held eleven to sixteen seats
after 1893. In Russia, the pogroms (direct attacks on
Jewish communities) killed thousands and led millions
to flee the country.
French anti-Semitism produced the most dramatic
human rights battle of the nineteenth century—the
Dreyfus affair. The French army was one of the few Eu-
ropean armies of the 1890s to open its officer corps to
Jews, and Captain Alfred Dreyfus was one of three hun-
dred French Jewish officers in the 1890s. Dreyfus was
serving as an artillery expert on the French General
Staff in 1894 when French counterintelligence found
evidence that artillery secrets from the General Staff
were reaching the Germans. Bigoted officers convicted
Dreyfus of treason and sentenced him to solitary im-
prisonment on Devil’s Island (off the northern coast of
South America), although they never possessed a shred
of evidence against him (see illustration 26.2). When
evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence began to accumulate inDOCUMENT 26.1
Clemenceau’s Radical-Democratic
Program, 1881
Article 1.Revision of the constitution. Aboli-
tion of the Senate and the Presidency....
Article 2.Individual freedom. Liberty of the
press, of meetings, of association, guaranteed by
the constitution....
Article 3.Separation of church and state. Sup-
pression of state aid for churches....
Article 4.The right of children to a full edu-
cation. Secular, free, obligatory education.
Article 5.Reduction of the term of military
service. Obligatory military service for all
citizens....
Article 6.Judicial system free and equal for
all. Judges elected for short terms.... Abolition of
the death penalty.
Article 7.Sovereignty of universal suffrage....
[S]horter terms of office for elected officials....
Article 9.Autonomy for local governments.
Town governments to control their own adminis-
tration, finances, police....
Article 11.Tax reform.... Suppression of in-
direct consumption taxes. Progressive taxes on
capital or income.
Article 13.Legalization of divorce.
Article 14.Reduction in the length of the
working day. Suppression of work by children
younger than fourteen.... Creation of retirement
savings for the aged and the injured.
Article 15.Revision of labor laws.... Respon-
sibility of employers for work-related accidents,
guaranteed by insurance.
Clemenceau, Georges. “Cahier des électeurs,” trans. Steven
C. Hause. La Justice,November 19, 1881.