In 1889, the collapse of a company set
up to build the Panama Canal involved
several members of the government in a
corruption scandal, which was one factor
in the dramatic
socialist gains
in the elections of 1893. More
importantly, the urban working class was
becoming more class-conscious under the
influence of the ideas of Karl Marx. The
strength of the movement, however, was
undermined by divisions, the chief one
being Jules Guesde's Marxian Party.
Among the independent socialists was
Jean Jaurès , who joined with Guesde
in 1905 to found the
Parti Socialiste
. The trade union movement, unified in
1895 as the
Confédération Générale du
Travail (CGT), remained aloof in its
anarcho-syndicalist preference for
direct action.
In 1894, Captain Dreyfus , a
Jewish army officer, was convicted by
court martial of spying for the Germans
and shipped off to the penal colony of
Devil's Island for life. It soon became
clear that he had been framed - by the
army itself - yet they refused to
reconsider his case. The affair
immediately became an issue between the
Catholic Right and the Republican Left,
with Jaurès, Émile Zola and Clemenceau
coming out in favour of Dreyfus. Charles
Maurras, founder of the fascist Action
Française - precursor of Europe's
Blackshirts - took the part of the army.
Dreyfus was officially rehabilitated
in 1904, with his health ruined by penal
servitude in the tropics. But in the
wake of the affair the more radical
element in the Republican movement had
begun to dominate the administration,
bringing the army under closer civilian
control and dissolving most of the
religious orders.
The country enjoyed a period of
renewed prosperity in the years
preceding World War I, yet there
remained serious unresolved conflicts in
the political fabric of French society.
On the Right was Maurras' lunatic fringe
with its strong-arm Camelots du Roi, and
on the Left, the far bigger constituency
of the working class - unrepresented in
government. Although most workers now
voted for it, the Socialist Party was
not permitted to participate in
bourgeois governments under the
constitution of the Second International,
to which it belonged. Several major
strikes were brutally suppressed
