Introduction

During the 1880s political life seemed increasingly polarized between a broad coalition of republicans committed to the defence of the existing liberal order, and the rising forces of organized socialism with its exclusivist critique of bourgeois society. Fearful of losing their traditional constituencies and, indeed, their raison d’être, both revolutionaries and conservatives faced hard political choices. Drawn inexorably together by their common opposition to the parliamentary regime, they used the nationalist amalgam of Boulangism to create a new political force. In the process, expediency melded with an intellectual tradition grounded in an emotional rejection of decadent bourgeois materialism and a profound sense of European civilization in decline. The result was a glissement of nationalism from left to right: from the bitter radical-socialist critique of the constitutional settlement of 1875 to the dark ruminations of Charles

Maurras; from the Boulangist campaign to establish ‘the democratic and social Republic’ to an utter rejection of both the republic itself and its spiritual underpinnings; from the inheritors of the Jacobin tradition of protest to the creators of what has been termed problematically the radical right.