ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the republic survived its challengers to dominate French politics, and how it spread republican institutions and values throughout France. France in the last decades of the nineteenth century found itself part of a wider world increasingly interconnected and driven by major technological innovation. The second industrial revolution was also an era of spectacular technical inventions, many of which would shape life in the new century to come. The new nation that came into being during the last decades of the nineteenth century was created in the image of republican universalism, and the policies implemented by the republicans would indelibly mark the face of modern France. The convulsive nature of what became known as the Dreyfus affair both revealed and produced profound fault lines in the Third Republic. Republican political culture identified itself with the "little man", and it held up the small town lawyer, businessman, and civil servant as the heart and soul of France.
