French Third Republic - The Opportunist Republicans

The Opportunist Republicans

Following the 16 May crisis in 1877, Legitimists were pushed out of power, and the Republic was finally governed by republicans, called Opportunist Republicans as they were in favor of moderate changes in order to firmly establish the new regime. The Jules Ferry laws on free, mandatory and secular (laїque) public education, voted in 1881 and 1882, were one of the first signs of this republican control of the Republic, as public education was no longer the exclusive control of the Catholic congregations.

To discourage French monarchism as a serious political force, in 1885 the French Crown Jewels were broken up and sold. Only a few crowns, their precious gems replaced by coloured glass, were kept.

In 1889, the Republic was rocked by the sudden Boulanger crisis. An enormously popular general, he won a series of elections—after each victory he resigned his seat and ran again in another district—that seemed threaten a dictatorship. Republicans rallied and defeated him. Revisionist scholars have argued that the Boulangist movement more often represented elements of the radical Left rather than the extreme Right. Their work is part of an emerging consensus that France's radical Right was formed in part during the Dreyfus era by men who had been Boulangist partisans of the radical Left a decade earlier.

The central issue for years was the Dreyfus Affair; it severely damaged the roaylist/Catholic/conservative cause, promoted secular intellectuals such as (Émile Zola) and led to the separation of Church and State. Later, the Panama scandals also were quickly criticized by the press.

In 1893, following anarchist Auguste Vaillant's bombing at the National Assembly, killing nobody but injuring one, deputies voted the lois scélérates which limited the 1881 freedom of the press laws. The following year, president Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio. Also in 1894, 30 alleged anarchists were judged during the Trial of the thirty.