The Astonishing Adventure of General Boulanger

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 23 cm, xii, [2], 251, [3] pages. Illustrations. Occasional footnotes. Index. DJ flap price clipped. DJ has some wear soiling. Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger (29 April 1837 - 30 September 1891), nicknamed Général Revanche, was a French general and politician.
An enormously popular public figure during the Third Republic, he won a series of elections and was feared to be powerful enough to establish himself as dictator at the zenith of his popularity in January 1889. His base of support was the working districts of Paris and other cities, plus rural traditionalist Catholics and royalists. He promoted an aggressive nationalism, known as Revanchism, which opposed Germany and called for the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) to be avenged. The elections of September 1889 marked a decisive defeat for the Boulangists. Changes in the electoral laws prevented Boulanger from running in multiple constituencies and the aggressive opposition of the established government, combined with Boulanger's self-imposed exile, contributed to a rapid decline of the movement. The decline of Boulanger severely undermined the political strength of the conservative and royalist elements of French political life; they would not recover strength until the establishment of the Vichy regime in 1940. The defeat of the Boulangists ushered in a period of political dominance by the Opportunist Republicans. He was never able to unite the disparate elements that formed the base of his support. He was able to frighten Republicans and force them to reorganize and strengthen their solidarity in opposition to him. He was born in Bath on 30 May 1929, the younger of two sons, and the Hardings soon moved to Trowbridge, where James attended the boys' high school. There was no music anywhere in the family. From Trowbridge he went on to study French at Bristol University, the course including a year at the Sorbonne. After the War he worked as a copywriter. For a first book, Saint-Saëns and his Circle was astonishing in its command of the many new facts it contained, and in its portrayal of the links and tensions between the composer and his times. If Saint-Saëns was not, as Harding conceded, an ideal subject for biography, his life containing ‘no Immortal Beloved, no Heiligenstadt Testament, and no Mysterious Stranger', this book gives no sign of difficult birth, and alerts us also to the value of much of Saint-Saëns's music beyond The Swan and Danse Macabre. From here on Harding's writing was fitted in round a job at Woolwich Polytechnic, teaching business French from 1969 to 1994, but the pace remained remarkable - some twenty books over the next 40 years, including theatrical subjects such as Ivor Novello, George Robey, C.B. Cochran, Gerald du Maurier and Emlyn Williams. But composers remained his chief interest. In 1973 he treated Gounod with sympathy but not blindly, and demonstrated a copywriter's sharpness in dealing with the composer's ‘manageress' in England, the awful Mrs Weldon. Massenet (1970), Rossini (1971) and Satie (1975) followed, together with two books of wider scope, The Ox on the Roof (1972) and Folies de Paris: The Rise and Fall of French Operetta (1979).