A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

736 Ch. 1 8 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalism

Deputies withheld its approval, MacMahon dissolved it and called for new
elections. He embarked, with the help of the Church, on a bitter campaign
to defeat Gambetta and the republicans.
However, France’s voters returned republicans again, although with a
smaller majority. MacMahon named a republican premier, and then
resigned in 1879. Henceforth, the role of the executive authority would be
weak because republicans feared that some Napoleonic character might try
to impose his rule—indeed that threat lay ahead. With the constitutional
privilege of dismissing government cabinets that had lost the confidence of
the majority of its members, the Chamber of Deputies would dominate
the political life of the French Third Republic. In 1881, the Chamber of
Deputies passed a bill granting full amnesty to exiled Communards.

The Third Republic

The governments of the new republic reflected the center of the political

spectrum, that of the “Opportunists,” so called because many of them

accepted a very conservative republic while preferring something more to

the center. Resolved to hold the center against the monarchists and the

Church on the right, and the anticlerical Radicals and the socialists to

their left, the Opportunists retained the support of peasants by implement­

ing high agricultural tariffs. The Meline Tariff, supported by industrialists

and farmers, went into effect in 1892.

The Opportunist republic guaranteed freedom of the press, legalized

public gatherings without prior authorization, and gave municipal councils

the right to elect their own mayors (with the exception of Paris, not allowed

to have a mayor—until 1977—for fear he might become too powerful). The

president served as something of a chairman of the board to the Chamber

of Deputies. He shook hands with everybody, intrigued pleasantly, and

helped form coalitions. Governments came and went, giving an exagger­

ated image of parliamentary instability and impotence.

Because the republic had only gradually taken root in the 1870s and had

been strongly contested by conservatives, the educational reforms of the

1880s had the goal not only of making France more literate but also more

republican. Jules Ferry (1832—1893) sponsored laws that made primary

education free and obligatory. The state allocated money to build village

schools. Although some priests and nuns stayed on to teach in what were

technically lay schools, the debates over the laicization of public schools

ensured the animosity of many prelates and practicing Catholics against

the “godless” republic.

General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus

Amid growing social and political division, during the 1880s the parliamen­

tary center began to melt under pressure from right and left. Nationalism