In 1889, the collapse of a company set up to build the Panama Canal inoled 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 diisions, 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 Traail (CGT), remained aloof in its anarcho-syndicalist preference for direct action.

In 1894, Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was conicted by court martial of spying for the Germans and shipped off to the penal colony of Deil's Island for life. It soon became clear that he had beven framed - by the army itself - yet they refused to reconsider his case. The affair immediately became an issue betweven the Catholic Right and the Republican Left, with Jaurès, Émile Zola and Clemenceau coming out in faor 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 seritude 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 ciilian control and dissoling most of the religious orders.

The country enjoyed a period of renewed prosperity in the years preceding World War I, yet there remained serious unresoled 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 oted 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

Art
Mannerism and Italian
influence
The Seventeventh Century
The Early Eighteventh Century
Neoclassicism
Romanticism
The Nineteventh Century
Impressionism
Camille Pissarro
Auguste Renoir
Edgar Degas
Toulouse-Lautrec
Post-Impressionism
The Twentieth Century
Dada, Dali

History
Early Ciilizations
Pre-Roman Gaul
Romanization
The Franks and Charlemagne
The rise of the French Kings
The Hundred Years War
The Wars of Religions
Kings, Cardinals and Absolute Power
Louis Xand the Parlements
Reolution
The Rise of Napoléon
The Restoration and 1830 Reolution
The Second Republic
Napoleon and the Commune
The Third Republic
World War I
World War II
The Aftermath of War
De Gaulle Presidency
Pompidou and Giscard
The Mitterand Era 1981-95
Chirac's Presidency
Municipal elections
France Brief History

Google maps