ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1880s, only a decade after the Republic had firmly established itself, it faced the first of the major political crises that would punctuate its existence, the Boulanger affair. The purpose of a socialist political party was to educate workers and organize them into a powerful political party that would ultimately carry out a revolution against the bourgeois capitalist order. Discontent caused by hard economic times was one reason for this; another was the fact that the moderate Opportunist republicans had largely exhausted their political agenda after the enactment of the Ferry laws. After the period of prosperity and economic growth that characterized the Second Empire, especially in its first decade, came a prolonged period in which the French economy experienced a marked slowdown. The “Great Depression of the Nineteenth Century,” lasting from 1873 to 1896, differed in important ways from the more devastating depression that afflicted the world in the 1920s and 1930s.
