The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  His departure proved an occasion for mob protest as hysterical as the jubilation on Bastille Day one year earlier. Thousands gathered outside the Gare de Lyon. Protesters nearly unhorsed Boulanger’s carriage and gave the police all they could handle until reinforcements arrived; then gendarmes cleared a path through the crowd as the general, in civilian dress, held his top hat high for everyone to see. Inside, the police encountered thousands more, thronging the great hall, barricading platforms, standing four deep on coaches, on girders, on canopies. Scrawled across a locomotive was the newly coined slogan “Il reviendra!” But it seemed the general would never leave. At length, Boulanger, besieged in a train compartment, was hustled over to his private coach. Maniacs lying on the railroad tracks like prostrate dervishes waiting to be trodden underfoot by the Holy Litter had been removed, and the train began its run south.

  While Boulanger marked time in Clermont-Ferrand, Boulangism marched forward and continued to raise alarms. Jules Ferry, who recognized the revolutionary impetus of revanchism in what was fast becoming a widespread movement, deplored its brutish character: “For some time we have been witnessing the development of a species of patriotism hitherto unknown in France. It is a noisy, despicable creed that seeks not to unify and appease but to set citizens against one another.” What distressed him was not nationalist sentiment per se but the tribal character of Boulangist nationalism, its Robespierrian exploitation of patriotic virtue, its intense xenophobia, its spurning of individual judgment and quasi-religious allegiance to a leader, its clamorous irrationalism. Where the new ethos prevailed, Montesquieu’s humanist oath—“If I knew something useful to my family but prejudicial to my country, I would endeavor to forget it; if I knew something useful to my country but harmful to Europe, or useful to Europe but harmful to the human race, I would reject it as a crime”—spelled treason. Indeed, Ferry, the consummate liberal, was, by Boulangist lights, more “foreign” than the Austrian demagogue Georg von Schönerer, whose nationalist association, the Verein der Deutschen Volkspartei, founded in 1881, had much in common with French populism. Warmongering hung a light veil over hatred of one’s bourgeois compatriots.

  The conviction upon which Boulangism thrived—that France needed a hero to clean house—was greatly strengthened in September 1887 by a scandal. It began, like the play illustrating Eugène Scribe’s dictum “Great effects from small causes,” with two trollops quarreling over a dress, and it ended three months later with Jules Grévy, president of the Republic, resigning from office. What came to light that autumn was the existence of an influential ring trafficking in decorations awarded by the state. Implicated were three generals, one of whom had been financially ruined six years earlier in a bank crash. Their confessions led investigators to Daniel Wilson, a prominent deputy who resided at the Élysée Palace with his wife, President Grévy’s daughter. Wilson had used his strategic position to raise revenue for his newspapers, selling membership in the Legion of Honor to well-connected nouveaux riches who wanted their mercantile success consecrated with a ribbon or rosette.

  Confusion, which had assisted Boulanger more than once, would favor him again during the parliamentary embroilment surrounding Grévy’s resignation. Among presidential candidates, Jules Ferry enjoyed an advantage in intellect and character, but Ferry was anathema to almost every party except his own, the opportunist republican faction: to the Right for having secularized institutional life, to left-wing Radicals for having expanded a colonial empire that benefited financial and industrial interests, to Boulangists for having disparaged Boulanger, and to nationalists altogether for having enjoyed excessively cordial relations with Bismarck. Moreover, intellect and character were not prerequisites for the presidency. Neither parliamentarians who wanted a figurehead nor anti-parliamentarians who wanted a savior insisted on greatness. Inoffensiveness was bound to emerge the victor from this scrum, and so it did in the person of Sadi Carnot, whose chief claim to fame was his family name. Elected president by the National Assembly on December 3, 1887, Carnot invited another reputable moderate to serve as prime minister. With the political landscape thus cleared of tall trees, a Parisian horizon opened for Boulanger.

  December 1887 and January 1888 played out like the phantasmagoria of Saint Anthony’s temptations. Malcontents right and left viewed Boulanger as the charismatic partner who would dance them into power. He was a soldier, pure and simple, he insisted. But the soldier, being all things to all men, welcomed all comers. Like disparate elements of an army advancing in the dark, Bonapartists, royalists, and radical republicans pretended not to notice who their allies were, or to forget and forgive until the regime they despised had been routed by the hero they embraced.

  A pivotal event in the hero’s career lay at hand. Boulanger had two self-styled impresarios, one being Count Arthur Dillon, a financier of low repute who sported a title of dubious authenticity, and the other a journalist, Georges Thiébaud, who had arranged a meeting between Boulanger and Napoleon’s nephew Jérôme Bonaparte. In February 1888, on the eve of seven by-elections, Thiébaud launched a publicity campaign urging voters to make Boulanger their write-in candidate. Fifty-five thousand people heeded him. The repercussions in Paris were immediate. Asked to explain himself, Boulanger assured General Logerot, minister of war, that his military duties occupied him to the exclusion of everything else. The secret service had meanwhile intercepted letters that proved Boulanger’s political activity. Having been unlawfully gathered, they could not be used against him, but another, admissible infraction supplied Logerot with all the evidence he needed: Boulanger had made three unauthorized trips to Paris, in disguise. Logerot suspended him from active service. On March 26, a council of inquiry took the next step and discharged him. Boulanger, who must on some level have regarded his electoral victory as a celebrity poll, was shocked.

  Thus began his brief, flamboyant political career. Boulangists—Maurice Barrès among them—stood ready with a platform based on three words; their slogan, “Dissolution, révision, constituante,” signified that Parliament should be dissolved, a new assembly elected, and the constitution revised. Scarcely a week after his victory in a region he had never visited, Boulanger set out to campaign in the industrial northeast, where, three years earlier, Zola had taken notes for his great saga of proletarian hell, Germinal. The flag was waved and Parliament thrashed. “You are called upon to decide whether or not a great nation such as ours can place its confidence in callow men who imagine that suppressing defense will eliminate war,” Boulanger declared. And again: “Even Parliament is frightened by the results of its inaction. It pretends to be rousing itself but doesn’t fool anyone.… For the impotence with which the legislative assembly is afflicted, there is only one solution: dissolution of the Chamber, revision of the Constitution.”

  Although Boulanger’s rhetoric was plebiscitary rather than evangelical, it made any rally a revival meeting. He addressed the abject misery of his audience but also spoke to a yearning that transcended material interests. For many people, he embodied “the Way.” Ferry had noted as much in 1887. Eight years later, the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon used Boulangism to exemplify what he called “the religious instinct” of crowds. “Today, most great soul-conquerors no longer have altars, but they still have statues or images, and the cult surrounding them is not notably different from that accorded their predecessors,” Le Bon wrote in La Psychologie des Foules. “Any study of the philosophy of history should begin with this fundamental point, that for crowds one is either a god or one is nothing.” Could anyone still believe that reason had firmly gained the upper hand of superstition? He continued:

  In its endless struggle with reason, emotion has never been vanquished. To be sure, crowds will no longer put up with talk about divinity and religion, in the name of which they were held in bondage; but they have never possessed so many fetishes, and the old divinities have never had so many statues and altars raised in their honor. Those who in recent years have studied the popula
r movement known as Boulangism have seen with what ease the religious instinct of crowds can spring to life again. There wasn’t a country inn that didn’t possess the hero’s portrait. He was credited with the power of remedying all injustices and all evils, and thousands of men would have immolated themselves for him.

  As with all popular creeds, Le Bon observed, Boulangism was shielded against contradiction by religious sentiment. It wasn’t Le Bon but Barrès who wrote, “[Boulanger’s] program is of no importance; it is in his person that one has faith. His presence touches hearts, warms them, better than any text. One wishes to let him rule because one is confident that in all circumstances he will feel as the nation does.”

  Boulanger won the north handily, in what one moderate called an “inexplicable vertigo that gripped the masses and left no room for rational thought.” Now representing a populous, industrial region, he planned to take his new seat four days later, on April 10, 1888. A landau (resembling “a harlot’s carriage,” wrote the Russian ambassador) fetched him at the Hôtel du Louvre. Drawn by two magnificent bays with green-and-red cockades pinned behind their ears, it circled the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde to the acclaim of a large crowd and continued past mounted soldiers guarding the bridge. Déroulède accompanied Boulanger as far as the Palais Bourbon, where ladies had packed the gallery. At that inaugural session, Boulanger said nothing. When the prime minister declared that Parliament should postpone debate on constitutional change until time had allayed suspicions that the issue might be a monarchist snare or a cloak for dictatorship, Boulanger held fire. On April 27, three hundred acolytes, all prinked with carnations, met to celebrate their new party, the Comité Républicain de Protestation Nationale (abbreviated to Comité National), at one of Paris’s most fashionable restaurants. Presiding over them was their leader, who exhorted Frenchmen to join him in creating an “open, liberal Republic.” Opponents on the left might have responded with a version of Voltaire’s famous quip about the Holy Roman Empire, that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

  Maurice Barrès did not attend the celebration on April 27. He was revisiting Venice for the third time. But he raised his glass with an article entitled “M. le Général Boulanger et la Nouvelle Génération.” Boulanger’s political inauguration was a ray of hope for France, he wrote, claiming to speak for “thousands of young people stifled by vulgarity.” Savants and artists who had met the general found him not only “infinitely seductive” but keenly aware of their work, unlike the “brutally ignorant” men in power. And unlike the latter, he loved the common man. It was to be hoped that his charismatic presence would discipline the “stupid free-thinkers” who indulged their passion for intrigue and bickering in the National Assembly. Parliamentary institutions repelled Barrès. He made no secret of it.

  And yet, with Boulanger’s blessing, he decided to run for office from Nancy in the fall of 1889, as the official candidate of the Comité National. “For any man of action constantly goaded by appetites,” he declared, “life is a constant state of war.” The platform on which he ran was Boulangist in its emphasis on constitutional reform, but with an anti-Semitic slant influenced by the demographics of eastern France, where many Jews resided. He was not anti-Jewish, he protested, only the advocate of countrymen being disloyally exploited. Implicitly, Jews were not countrymen but foreigners and disloyal. His first legislative campaign thus prefigured his anti-Dreyfusism.14

  The odds against Barrès were steep. Even if his potential constituents, few of whom read books, had read the second novel of his trilogy, Un Homme Libre, in which Lorraine is seen to be his genetic crib, they might have regarded the tall, slim, suspiciously well-groomed twenty-seven-year-old speaking Parisian French through his nose as a carpetbagger.

  Against all odds, Barrès, whose family hadn’t been able to help him secure a modest clerkship in the Chamber of Deputies five years earlier, entered the chamber as a full-fledged deputy. “The thing I relished about my adversaries was the energy of their insults. No healthier milieu. The delightful brawls of September and October! … That’s where I came to love life. Raw instinct!” he wrote. And elsewhere: “The violence of approbation and disapprobation was a tonic. I relished the instinctive pleasure of being in a herd.” Friends were astonished that someone who personified hauteur and archness could have stooped to fighting in the vulgar guise of a Boulangist. How did he reconcile his pugilism with his annual pilgrimages to Venice or the pleasure of afternoons spent in the atelier of Jacques-Émile Blanche, Paris’s foremost society portraitist?

  Anatole France concluded that Barrès had perpetrated a hoax on the voters of Nancy. Others thought the same. Had they known him since childhood, however, they might have guessed that he was avenging himself on the boy who’d shied away from playground havoc. “Instinct,” “energy,” “temperament,” “animality,” “roots,” “soul,” “unconscious” became core words in the vocabulary of an ideologue at war with himself—or with the culture of which he was a particularly refined product. Interviewed soon after his election by the newspaper Le Matin, he stated that his political life would be devoted to the defense of democratic ideas and the principle of authority. “My temperament carries me in that direction. I have always celebrated the instincts, generosity, whatever else constitutes the soul of the populace. I also revere the intelligence oriented toward a leader chosen by popular instinct.”15 The larger irony was that his Kantian professor of philosophy at the Nancy lycée, Auguste Burdeau, had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies from Lyon four years earlier, and sat to the left of his proto-Fascist student.

  The largest irony was that Boulanger no longer sat in the chamber and no longer resided in France. On June 4, 1888, several months after his election from the north, he had presented his brief for constitutional revision to fellow deputies. What they heard was not so much a carefully reasoned argument as a catalog of ambiguous measures. He denounced the regime in the strongest possible terms but otherwise spoke by rote, like a man going through the motions of parliamentary discourse. Openly contemptuous of him was Prime Minister Charles Floquet, who declared that young Napoleon returning from a victorious campaign had not addressed the Council of Five Hundred as haughtily as Boulanger did the Chamber of Deputies. What deeds authorized his impudence?

  Undaunted, Boulanger mounted the tribune again five weeks later to demand that a stale, impotent, unrepresentative legislature be dissolved and new elections held before the World’s Fair of 1889. Once again, Floquet refuted him, mocking the pretensions to open, liberal government of a man who had spent more time in “sacristies” and “princes’ antechambers” than in republican forums.

  Boulanger’s secret pact with the monarchist party, which underwrote his campaigns, did not embarrass him. He resigned his seat in high dudgeon and, declaring that his honor had been impugned, challenged Floquet to a duel.

  Floquet accepted the challenge. The combatants met on July 13. No one imagined that the feisty, potbellied, bowlegged fifty-nine-year-old prime minister would gain the upper hand, but he did, and buried the point of his foil in Boulanger’s neck.

  Instead of deflating Boulanger, the wound earned him political kudos. Humiliated at the hands of the bourgeois establishment as France had been humiliated at the hands of Germany, the general could still do no wrong. Five months later, a by-election to fill a Paris seat provided the springboard for his leap into the heartland of republican strength. Electioneering began in mid-January 1889. Republicans had chosen a candidate, Édouard Jacques, whose joviality made him acceptable to most factions. The posters that had littered provincial towns in Boulanger’s previous campaign now plastered the capital. To approach the Orangerie was to encounter Boulanger’s face on the flanks of the lions overlooking the Place de la Concorde. To enter the Opéra was to see his name stenciled on the steps. Boulanger stumped neighborhoods rich and poor, running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. Often accompanied by Paul Déroulède, he had the full support of the militaris
tic Ligue des Patriotes. To radical republicans he spoke as a radical. Catholic clergy embraced him despite the misgivings of their prelates. The Comte de Paris waffled, but royalist papers uniformly endorsed him. And indispensable to the movement was a large population of the generally disaffected.

  On July 27, Boulanger garnered far more votes than Jacques. In the dead of winter, crowds chanting, “Vive Boulanger!” filled the Boulevard des Italiens, the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Workers who had streamed down from Montmartre joined well-groomed gentlemen from the beaux quartiers. Trumpets blared “La Marseillaise” outside the offices of L’Intransigeant while royalists at Le Gaulois prepared to toast the future restoration.

  Election results reached Boulanger at Durand’s restaurant on the Place de la Madeleine, where his patroness, the immensely rich Duchesse d’Uzès, presided over one banquet table and his herald, Paul Déroulède over another. News of a landslide, the prodigal flow of champagne, thousands outside shouting, “À l’Élysée!” made thoughts of a coup d’état suddenly thinkable. Boulanger’s entourage believed that a march on the presidential palace could be accomplished without serious opposition from gendarmes, the Republican Guard, or regiments garrisoned in Paris. Déroulède urged Boulanger to wait until the morning, when his Ligue des Patriotes would have assembled twenty thousand strong at the Palais Bourbon. Boulanger himself fought shy of danger, arguing that regimes born of coups d’état died of original sin, and that in any event he stood to gain power legally six months later, at the general election. In Nancy, Maurice Barrès was jubilant.