ABSTRACT
The Boulanger crisis was an indication of the danger, perpetually lurking just below the surface of French political life, of the ability of the demagogue or the strong man by an appeal to national unity to rally around himself all those bearing resentment toward the regime. The Dreyfus Affair showed the Republicans, and eventually the Socialists, that the union of the former constituent elements of the ancien regime—the army, the Church, and the aristocracy—imperiled the life of the Republic. While the strength of the Dreyfusards was provincial, republican, and plebeian, drawing considerable support from the literary world and the universities, the antirevisionists were largely Parisian and upper middle class, including Royalists and most of the French Academy. The French bishops allowed the Church to identify itself with the cause of the General Staff and the forgers, and even put the vitriolic Drumont in a position to pose as the spokesman of French Catholicism.
