Between 1879 and 1899 the Opportunists, with only brief interruptions, controlled the machinery of government. Gambetta, their most dynamic leader, had begun his career as an outspoken Radical, but in time his political instincts had prevailed. The other Opportunist leaders—men such as President Grévy and Jules Ferry—disliked Gambetta’s flamboyance, however, and feared his alleged dictatorial ambitions; they kept him out of the premiership save for a brief interlude in 1881–82, shortly before his death. Ferry served as premier or in other key cabinet posts during most of the period from 1880 to 1885 and left his mark on two institutions: the public school system and the colonial empire. His school laws made primary education free, compulsory, and secular, with religious teaching in the public schools replaced by “civic education”; a strong anticlerical bias thenceforth marked French public education. Ferry’s support of various colonial expeditions—sometimes behind the back of the Chamber—gave France protectorates over Tunisia and in Vietnam (Annam and Tonkin), a large new colony in the Congo basin, and an initial foothold in Madagascar. This expansionist policy, unpopular at the time, led later generations to call Ferry the founder of the French empire.

In the 1885 elections the monarchists, Bonapartists, and Radicals all made significant gains, partly because of boredom with the Opportunists, Catholic resentment over the school laws, and revived agitation by socialist organizers. The Opportunists, lacking a clear majority in the Chamber, sought Radical support to form a cabinet; the Radicals insisted on the inclusion of General Georges Boulanger as minister of war. Within a few weeks Boulanger was the most talked-about man in France. He restored the tradition of military parades and rode at their head; he instituted popular reforms in the army; and he spoke out in chauvinistic fashion against the Germans, thus reviving the memory of 1871 and the lost provinces. The unnerved Opportunist leadership dropped him from the cabinet and sent him in 1887 to an obscure provincial command. But Boulanger’s backers urged him to plunge into politics and began to enter his name in by-elections. Privately, monarchist and Bonapartist agents also made contact with Boulanger, promising financial support and hoping to use him for their cause.

By 1889 the Boulanger movement had become a major threat to the regime. The government had placed him on the retired list, but this merely freed him to run openly for office on a vague program of constitutional revision. He triumphed in a series of by-elections, but his goal was the parliamentary election of 1889, which he hoped to turn into a kind of national plebiscite. Just prior to the election, however, believing that he was about to be arrested for subversive activities, Boulanger took flight to Brussels. His movement gradually disintegrated; word leaked out of his dealings with the monarchists, and his supporters fell away. The Opportunists’ hold on the republic was strengthened by the discomfiture of those on both right and left who had been taken in by this adventurer.

A new crisis soon arose for the regime: the Panama Scandal. Ferdinand, vicomte de Lesseps, the noted French engineer who had built the Suez Canal, had organized a joint-stock company to cut a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. The venture proved difficult and costly; in 1889 the company collapsed, and large numbers of shareholders were stripped of their savings. Demands for a parliamentary investigation proved ineffective until 1892, when a muckraking journalist named Édouard Drumont obtained evidence that agents of the company had bribed a large number of politicians and journalists in a desperate effort to get funds to keep the company afloat. The directors of the company and several deputies and senators were brought to trial in 1893, but the outcome was on the whole a whitewash. The regime survived the scandal, but the effects were more serious than first appeared to be the case. Cynicism about the honesty of the republic’s political leadership bolstered the rising socialist movement; in 1893 almost 50 socialists won seats in the Chamber. Clemenceau, unjustly accused of involvement in the scandal, was defeated; and many prominent Opportunists, tainted by the affair, withdrew and were replaced by such younger men as Raymond Poincaré and Louis Barthou, who thenceforth preferred to call themselves Progressists or Moderates.

The dramatic socialist gains in 1893 resulted only partly from the Panama Scandal. For more than a decade socialism had been gaining strength among the increasingly class-conscious urban workers. The movement was weakened, however, by multiple splits into antagonistic factions. The Marxist party created by Jules Guesde in 1880 broke up two years later into Guesdists and followers of Paul Brousse—the latter group popularly called Possibilists because of their gradualist temper. In 1890 a third faction broke away, headed by Jean Allemane and limited to simon-pure proletarian members. Alongside these Marxist sects there were the Blanquistes (disciples of Auguste Blanqui [1805–81]), the anarchists (whose terrorist campaign in the early 1890s earned them wide notoriety), and a considerable scattering of independent socialists (mainly intellectuals, notably Jean Jaurès). By 1900 the parties had been reduced to the two led by Guesde and Jaurès, which merged in 1905 to form the French Section of the Workers’ International (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière; SFIO), known as the Socialist Party.

The trade union movement, however, refused to join forces with the socialists. Trade unions were finally legalized in 1884 and joined together to form a national General Labour Confederation (Confédération Générale du Travail; CGT) in 1895. CGT leaders rejected political action in favour of direct action—sabotage, boycotts, strikes, and especially the general strike, which they saw as the ultimate weapon that would transform France into a workers’ state. This doctrine, known as revolutionary syndicalism, made the French trade union movement appear to be one of the most radical in Europe. In practice, however, the trade union rank and file was less revolutionary than its leadership.