General Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger 1837 1891 French reactionary politician
Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger (April 29, 1837 – September 30, 1891) was a French general and reactionary politician. During the early days of the newly formed Third Republic, he was the first in a series of scandals that tarnished the Republic known as the Boulanger Affair between 1885-89. At the apogee of his power in January 1889, it seemed he might attempt a coup d'état, threatening the very existence of the Republic with a military dictatorship. It was in the capacity of War Minister that Boulanger gained most popularity. He introduced reforms for the benefit of soldiers (such as allowing soldiers to grow beards) and appealed to the French desire for revenge against Imperial Germany - in doing so, came to be regarded as the man destined to serve that revenge (nicknamed Général Revanche). He also managed to quell the major workers' strike in Decazeville. A minor scandal arose when Philippe, Comte de Paris, the nominal inheritor of the French throne in the eyes of Orléanist monarchists, married his daughter Amélie to Portugal's Carlos I, in a lavish wedding that provoked fears of anti-Republican ambitions. The French Parliament hastily passed a law expelling all possible claimants to the crown from French territories. Boulanger found himself in the unusual posture of a monarchist sympathiser forced to communicate to d'Aumale his expulsion from the armed forces. He received the adulation of the public and press after the Sino-French War, when France's victory added Tonkin to its colonial empire. He also vigorously pressed for the accelerated adoption, in 1886, of the new and technically revolutionary Lebel rifle which introduced for the first time smokeless powder high-velocity ammunition. On Freycinet's defeat in December of the same year, Boulanger was retained by René Goblet at the war office. Confident of political support, the general began provoking the Germans: he ordered military facilities to be built in the border region of Belfort, forbade the e
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