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 favor 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

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