On a May market day in 1895 socialists in the Isère mining town of La Mure held a meeting to attract visitors from the countryside. Addressing 400 inhabitants “de tous environs,” a deputy began his political appeal with “Vous paysans.” There it ended. The audience jeered, shouted, hissed, and ignored all attempts to restore order. The deputy and his colleagues tried to calm the crowd but, says the mayor, the meeting degenerated into a ludicrousbouffonnerieand had to be quickly terminated.¹ The mayor might have held a political or personal grudge against these visiting socialists—the audience reaction might...

Lucien Febvre described facts as hooks on which we hang ideas.¹ An investigation of rural France would, ideally, consider facts from scores of departments, hundreds of cantons, thousands (at least) of France’s over 30,000 communes, from the Nord to Provence, Brittany to Alsace. The portrait would be finely brushed but never final. In the end it might only reveal the pretensions of a historian who believed that the quality of his ideas could be measured by the quantity of his hooks. It is the historian’s business to select representative examples with care. In this case, thetour de Francewhich...

“There is no way of stemming the Boulangist tide,” the French socialist Paul Lafargue wrote Friedrich Engels in 1888. “The country is demented.” Engels agreed, adding that Henri Rochefort, Boulanger’s most active propagandist, “seems off his head.” As for the peasants, they are “mercenary soldiers [lansquenets] who will always serve in the conqueror’s army by choice.…”¹ A police informant shared Engels’ assessment: “Peasants, tenant farmers, and all those who are tied in some way to rich conservatives are today perfectly won over [by Boulangists]. When the efforts of the clergy are also considered, one has an idea of the situation.”²...

Goncourt was mistaken. General Boulanger’s political fate, like that of his Bonapartist predecessors, would hinge on more than songs, imagery, and hired hawkers. The movement’s sophisticated, well-financed organization could attract the attention of country people, but success or failure in villages and hamlets would depend on a variety of local conditions. We shall see that interest in Boulangism ranged from noteworthy in parts of the rural Isère, Savoie, and Orne, to marginal in much of the Gers, Marne, and Vendée. But peasants lived in concrete communities, not abstract administrative units, and only the “truffle hunter,” as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie...

Boulangists contributed to the architecture of modern European anti-Semitism. Constructed early in the Third Republic, it reached its height in France during the Dreyfus Affair. Anti-Semitic attacks may have been peripheral to Boulangism outside the Marne and a few other regions, and largely centered in cities, but those supporters of the General who chose to revivify the dying movement by politicizing anti-Semitism must take their place alongside Edouard Drumont, his contemporary Karl Lueger in Austria, and their twentieth century descendants.

Political anti-Semites did not let their cause die with the General. They had just begun. In the half-decade preceding the...

Late on the night of January 24, 1898, a handful of homemade posters were attached to walls in the town of Vitry le François (Marne). “Down with the Jews,” they read, “Worker, your sole enemy is the Jew; hang him to the lamppost; down with Zola; long live the Army!” The police commissioner in this largechef-lieuwas not alarmed: “Simply youthful roguery,” he informed the subprefect, with no echo, no menace to the general population. He detained six men and arrested one; twenty-five-year-old Ernest Lirman—a drunk.¹

The local republican newspaper called the display a cowardly act, the work...