738 Ch. 1 8 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalism
name while he sat in a restaurant quietly eating dinner. But his moment
passed. Two years later, government officials convinced the naive general
that they held evidence that could lead to his conviction on charges of
state treason. Boulanger caught a train to Belgium and, on the grave of his
late mistress, took out his army pistol and blew out his brains.
Having survived Boulanger, the republic then received an unexpected
boost from its old enemy, the Catholic Church, whose “rallying” (the Ral~
liement) to the republic began with an archbishops toast in 1891 in
Tunisia. Henceforth, the moderate republicans could draw on political
support from the Catholic right against the socialist parties.
Another scandal gave the anti-parliamentary right a new focus for oppo
sition. In 1881, a French company had begun to dig the Panama Canal
under the direction of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had overseen the con
struction of the Suez Canal. This canal proved to be even more challenging
to build because of difficult terrain and malarial conditions. Company offi
cials bribed government officials in the hope of gathering sufficient support
to get the Chamber of Deputies to approve a loan that would be financed by
a national lottery. The Chamber of Deputies obligingly approved the plan,
but the financial campaign fell short. When the company went broke in
1889, more than half a million investors lost their money.
In 1892, Edouard Drumont’s right-wing newspaper La Libre Parole pub
lished a series of revelations about the scandal. Drumont had earlier pub
lished a book in which he claimed that Jewish financiers were conspiring to
dominate France. Now, the fact that some of the directors of the defunct
company had been Jewish helped generate support for the League of Patri
ots, founded in 1892, a nationalist and anti-Semitic organization of the
extreme right. The next year an
indulgent court acquitted all but
one of those implicated in the
scandal.
The next scandal was such a
series of dramatic events that it
became known for years simply
as “the Affair.” It pitted right
against left; the army, Church,
and monarchists against repub
licans and, in time, socialists;
and family against family.
Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935)
was the son of an old Jewish
family from Alsace. His family
had been peddlers and then tex
tile manufacturers. They were
assimilated Jews, proudly con
The suicide of General Boulanger. sidering themselves French. Fol