By Herbert Gorman $3.00 FARRAR & RINEHART
IN the eighties, during the presidencies of Grévy and Sadi Carnot, the Third French Republic, as a ship of state, was cranky, ill found, and leaking at the seams. The people of France were dissatisfied with their own experimental creation; corruption and venality marked their politicians and bureaucracy; the old wounds of the Prussian War constantly ached and cried out for revenge. The times were ripe for a leader, for someone to take them out of this morass of second-rate degradation and to recreate a France glorious, purified, and proud.
Such a man a majority of Frenchmen thought they had found in Général Georges Boulanger. A successful military leader in colonial campaigns, an upbuilder of army organization and morale, immensely popular with all classes, he was pushed by self-seeking politicians and led by public adulation into being the White Hope of France — the man on horseback who would redeem everything.
For a time, France was his for the asking. He had only to nod, and a coup d’état, perfectly prepared, would have enthroned him as Dictator. (What Germany would have done in that situation, few people stopped to think.) In the moment of crisis, he refused to act. The moment passed. His position and prestige dwindled steadily away. He was outwitted by politicians, attacked, indicted, and condemned, and ended his melancholy days, a failure and a suicide, in exile.
The reasons for his failure were to be found in the essential weakness, the lack of iron and cold ambition, in his own nature. He liked the trappings of greatness and the sunlight of popularity; he would scheme and plot and stage an admirable show, but he would not fight and trample and kill to obtain his ends. He had twice the opportunities offered to Napoleon and nothing of Napoleon’s ferocious, acquisitive, one-track ambition.
This same yielding weakness made him an easy prey to a consuming love — a love which devoured him and his career. His mistress, the Vicomtesse de Bonnemains, engulfed and ultimately destroyed him. She hated his public life and insisted that he live for her alone. He did so and he died for her. Dramatic to the last, he shot himself by her grave in Brussels, less than three months after her death from tuberculosis.
Mr. Gorman treats this chapter of history with great understanding and few illusions. His characters are clearly drawn and his immense canvas includes a vast number of people and scenes. Interwoven with the story ot Boulanger is that of a group of obscure bourgeois or worse who inhabit a third-rate apartment house, called a cité, in the frowzy suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois. Each one of these ‘little people’ is affected, some of them violently and profoundly, by the career of their plaster hero. The author thus presents a kind of comédie bumaine of this particular period which is singularly convincing, if frequently unpleasant and sordid.
This is a very considerable book. Its length of 625 pages is not unjustified in view of its scope and its meticulous detail. Like Pendennis, it is a book without a hero, for not even as a great lover was Boulanger convincingly heroic. R. E. D.