AHC & WI: Boulanger leader of France

The challenge is to make Boulanger the leader of France. He can have whatever title you deem to be most plausible. A monarch or emperor can be the head of state, as long as executive power rests with Boulanger.

It shouldn't be a particularly difficult challenge, since we were so close to a coup OTL, but there were some problems of personality, ie. Boulanger procrastinating by running off to be with his lover when he should have been conducting the coup. He wasn't a particularly good speaker either, but no one seemed to care about that at the time.

Then I want you to consider what Boulanger's France would be like. Which other French politicians and movements would see their star rise under Boulanger? Where do France's various political factions fall (Republicans, Orleanists, Legitimists, Bonapartists, Communists)? How long can his regime last and how does it end? Can Boulangism develop into a long-lived political faction with standing equal to the others? Will France at large accept another Paris-centred dictatorship?

No interest? Pretty please?

The problem with an AH Boulanger was that he was a French Sarah Palin, an impressive looking person with a semi-impressive background that on closer inspection was all just a lot of hot air and no substance.

And that, like Sarah Palin, was the sum total of his appeal. Both French ultra-leftists and ultra-rights could claim him as their own given his vacuousness.

It was an era in French politics after the disaster of the Franco-Prussian war when the polities of all stripes were looking for a new Napoleon to lead them out of the darkness. They all thought Boulanger was him, and they were all wrong.

You might want to have a look at Fight and Be Right, where Boulanger gets covered in detail. As JacktheCat says, Boulanger's problem was that everyone, whether Republican or Royalist, Right or Left, projected their own desires on to him, and he was never going to be able to satisfy them all. This means that if he did sweep to power he'd have a wonderful honeymoon period and then find it increasingly difficult to paper over the cracks in his mutually contradictory coalition.

What this means in practice? Well, you'd get constitutional reform out of it, probably involving a strong President and maybe looking a little like OTL's Fifth Republic. The military would get a makeover too (and for all Boulanger's faults, he was an effective military reformer). In foreign policy terms Boulanger was a revanche but not an idiot- however his rhetoric was so bloodcurdling on Germany that his supporters would expect him to do something, which will be a problem. I suspect this mean lots of colonial adventures to distract the public. In FaBR I also posit a determined effort to attract European immigrants to France (of which there were many IOTL) to offset Germany's demographic advantages.

Best case scenario, Boulanger enacts some reforms, just about keeps things together for about a decade and then has the sense to retire gracefully when it's all about to fall apart for him; more likely, as in FaBR, is that an ncreasingy desperate Boulanger blunders into an unwinnable war with one of his neighbours and gets a sparking for his trouble.

Well, in Fight and Be Right he ends up leaning to the right. If I could tweak the challenge somewhat, how can one get him to end up leaning to the left and how might it change things?

Rush Tarquin said:

Well, in Fight and Be Right he ends up leaning to the right. If I could tweak the challenge somewhat, how can one get him to end up leaning to the left and how might it change things?

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He pisses off the other half of the population and his rule collapses on roughly a similar time-scale?

Thoresby said:

He pisses off the other half of the population and his rule collapses on roughly a similar time-scale?

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As in, how might his policies and the opinion of what Boulangerism is differ? More populist authoritarian French republican thought? Less anti-Semitism? Less imperialism? It would be strange, because Boulanger was the author of a number of imperial ventures himself. Without them, it might hasten the collapse of his rule.

I don't appreciate deliberately unhelpful and snarky answers either.

Rush Tarquin said:

The challenge is to make Boulanger the leader of France. He can have whatever title you deem to be most plausible. A monarch or emperor can be the head of state, as long as executive power rests with Boulanger.

It shouldn't be a particularly difficult challenge, since we were so close to a coup OTL, but there were some problems of personality, ie. Boulanger procrastinating by running off to be with his lover when he should have been conducting the coup. He wasn't a particularly good speaker either, but no one seemed to care about that at the time.

Then I want you to consider what Boulanger's France would be like. Which other French politicians and movements would see their star rise under Boulanger? Where do France's various political factions fall (Republicans, Orleanists, Legitimists, Bonapartists, Communists)? How long can his regime last and how does it end? Can Boulangism develop into a long-lived political faction with standing equal to the others? Will France at large accept another Paris-centred dictatorship?

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I did a semi timeline about this same scenario resulting in a French victory in a Second Franco-Prussian War: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=82245

Ahem.

I have to disagree pretty strongly about the idea of "Boulanger = more colonial ventures". A huge portion of his advocates were against colonial expansion (In one of those strange little quirks of French fin de siecle politics, the majority of the Right was against colonial expansion, the majority of the Left was all for La Mission Civilisatrice) Boulanger would not be engaging in any major colonial ventures, not after his stance towards Germany garnered him so much support. Twelve servants aren't worth two sisters, as certain French nationalists were wont to say.

I also have to disagree with the idea that Boulanger was nothing but a blank slate. He was a blank slate to the same degree that the Cercle d'Proudhon or Action Francaise were. There is a pretty clear lineage of those movements from the Boulangerist movement. Boulanger gave them a model and they worked on it from there. Really, the Right/Left thing is pretty common in every supposed "Third Way" ideology (seems pretty logical, doesn't it) I'm not saying a Boulanger regime will be identical but it will have many similarities. The biggest flights of fancy on the part of Boulanger were from monarchists, which is beared out in accounts of the day.

Now, was Boulangerism (or more properly, Revisionism) lacking in intellectual backing? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean it was without ideas or that, once in the seat of government, it would be paralyzed by inaction. I agree that any Boulanger regime is going to have its own half-baked ideas, unfinished grand projects and so on- but it is going to be doing something, anything, at all times, to keep up a sort of governmental frenzy. That will be what distracts a disaffected populace- not colonial ventures.

That's actually one of the most interesting ideas I came up with Revisionism- its, in a manner of speaking, Fascism in reverse. Where that was an intellectual movement that later garnered popular support (an anti-democratic democratic movement) Revisionism is going to evolve in the opposite direction as a popular movement that then gets attached to theoretical abstracts. In that respect, its quite similar to Peronism- which went from being a few nice platitudes about descamisados to being a school of political thought whose presence is still felt today.

Hope this helps.

Rush Tarquin said:

As in, how might his policies and the opinion of what Boulangerism is differ? More populist authoritarian French republican thought? Less anti-Semitism? Less imperialism? It would be strange, because Boulanger was the author of a number of imperial ventures himself. Without them, it might hasten the collapse of his rule.

I don't appreciate deliberately unhelpful and snarky answers either.

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Less anti-Semitism isn't likely. The Dreyfus Affair was a product of first, the military's inbred attitudes and secondly, a very real fear of the alien in French culture at the time. Its going to happen under Boulanger regardless, and if he remains neutral, his supporters (mostly the sort who supported Dreyfus's conviction) are going to lead the discussion more in their favor. With what is likely to be a more authoritarian state, their opinions will be the only ones allowed, so any J'accuse movement is likely to be much more low-key if it enters the public sphere at all.

Jester said:

I have to disagree pretty strongly about the idea of "Boulanger = more colonial ventures". A huge portion of his advocates were against colonial expansion (In one of those strange little quirks of French fin de siecle politics, the majority of the Right was against colonial expansion, the majority of the Left was all for La Mission Civilisatrice) Boulanger would not be engaging in any major colonial ventures, not after his stance towards Germany garnered him so much support. Twelve servants aren't worth two sisters, as certain French nationalists were wont to say.

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Ah, so it was a common thing among the right. I read Paul Déroulède, one of Boulanger's supporters, was anti-colonialism because he thought France should focus on revanche. One of the reasons Boulanger was popular was due to what was accomplished in Indochina though, no?

Jester said:

Less anti-Semitism isn't likely. The Dreyfus Affair was a product of first, the military's inbred attitudes and secondly, a very real fear of the alien in French culture at the time. Its going to happen under Boulanger regardless, and if he remains neutral, his supporters (mostly the sort who supported Dreyfus's conviction) are going to lead the discussion more in their favor. With what is likely to be a more authoritarian state, their opinions will be the only ones allowed, so any J'accuse movement is likely to be much more low-key if it enters the public sphere at all.

Click to expand...

I'd also read Paul Déroulède wasn't anti-Semitic, but the membership of his League of Patriots were.

He got the position in government because of his time in Indochina. The thing that made into a Saint-Arnaud of the cafe-concert crowd was his statements while he was in that position. The specifics of where or what his achievements were wasn't really important, what was important was that he was a military man who talked openly about revanche and could offer up such nice sounding platitudes as "Perhaps somewhere right now, a poor soldier is sharing his bread with a striking worker."