ABSTRACT
Republicans feared the alienation of industrial workers and agricultural labourers from the Republic that a frequent military presence at strikes was most likely to produce. A discrepancy thus seems to exist between the official argument concerning the threat to the stability of the Republican regime, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that the majority of incidents to which the army was mobilised proceeded in a quite peaceful manner. A full-scale military repression of a protest movement that had gone out of control might easily spell the end of the Republic. The civil-warlike repression of the Commune was still fresh in the collective memory, and even bloody confrontation at a much smaller scale, such as the shooting at Fourmies, threatened to destroy the fragile consensus among the different groups supporting the Republican institutions. Between 17 and 19 March 1906, Basly, Socialist deputy and mayor of Lens, lost control over the strikers.
