Letting Georges Do It

BOULANGER by James Harding. 251 pages. Scribners. $8.95.

He is remembered as the original of that perennial threat to shaky governments, "the man on horseback." Adoring crowds threw themselves on the tracks at the Gare de Lyon to keep him from leaving Paris. Three hundred songs were written about him, and copies by the thousands were hawked in the streets. Fast-selling lines of dishes, pens and bric-a-brac carried his portrait to the consuming public. On Bastille Day 1886, when he rode down the Champs-Elysees on his great black horse, all France lay at his feet. Indeed, on three occasions General Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger had only to stroll to the Elysee Palace and the government of France would have been his. Each time, mysteriously, he drew back.

In 1891, after Boulanger shot himself over his mistress's fresh grave, his former political patron, Georges Clemenceau, produced a suitably cruel epitaph. "Boulanger," sneered the Tiger, "died, as he had lived, like a subaltern." Now, in the first complete biography of Boulanger, English Historian and Musicologist James Harding offers to set the record straight. Sexual infatuation as well as drugs, he concedes, played a part in the general's rise and fall. Poor and provincial, Boulanger was wounded six times in battle before becoming a general in the French army at the comparatively young age of 42. The last of his many mistresses, the Vicomtesse de Bonnemains, began giving him nightly doses of morphine to ease the pain of old wounds; as a result, he grew both melancholy and erratic. Yet, Harding shows, it was soldierly scruple that really lay behind Boulanger's retreat from power.

Puppet Show. In the later years of the 19th century, the Third Republic could rarely be described as a working democracy. Haunted by France's humiliating defeat in the war of 1870 enraged clericals and anticlericals, lurking royalists and Bonapartists, wild radicals and Republicans turned the parliamentary process into a dismal puppet show. Chosen Minister of War in 1886, Boulanger swiftly, humanely and intelligently democratized, reorganized and re-equipped France's demoralized army. Like Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952, he became, almost overnight and with little effort on his part, the center of a whirlwind political force. "Boulangism" offered not politics but panaceas. Resurrect Gallic glory. Restore the lost provinces. Inaugurate an income tax. Give France a powerful presidency (which another general would do in 1958). Whatever it was, the general's adherents suggested, Georges would do it.

In the name of order and authority, Georges seemed willing to try. What he would not do, as it turned out to everyone's surprise, was risk the disorder of civil war and bloodshed, however brief. When Boulanger was about to be overwhelmingly elected Deputy on a national ticket, an aide routinely asked him: "Will you sleep in the Elysee, or will you have the Chamber of Deputies invaded?" "Are you mad?" Boulanger replied. On the eve of the expected coup, members of the government were already burning secret documents. Crowds and troops stood ready for his word to march. Boulanger simply retired to his bed, taking Marguerite de Bonnemains with him.

Harding is brisk, knowing, and often very funny in presenting what he obviously savors most, the menagerie of political grotesques surrounding Boulanger and the matchless rhetorical savagery of Third Republic France. What he never explains is the charm the man possessed, the almost mesmeric hold he exerted over comrades-in-arms, friends, mistresses, and masses of Frenchmen. One comes to accept Boulanger not as an ambitious schemer but as what the French call un brave type. Yet some warm element is missing from Harding's portrait as well as from a series of photographs showing off the general's broad forehead, flowing mustache and neat beard. Boulanger stares back at us as enigmatically as a western gunslinger in a faded antique portrait. It is hard to believe that radiant charisma ever clung to this numb and meaty visage.

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