Book excerpt: Recent scholarship on General Boulanger's bid for power in France's Third Republic has focused on the combination of socialism and national chauvinism in the movement supporting his campaign, seeing in this alliance the left-wing origins of 20th-century fascism. In this groundbreaking study, based on archival materials only recently made available to scholars, Irvine challenges that analysis, arguing that royalist and conservative supporters provided the crucial financial and electoral backing to the Boulanger movement.