Clemenceau showed himself during his lengthy control of power an astute politician. In the public eye ever since the days of the Commune, he had had success during the eighties as a destroyer of cabinets. Driven into the background by the Panama scandals, he now came forward again to try his fortune in holding the power from which he had often driven others. With a Cabinet thoroughly under his dictatorial control, he announced a programme which was to depend for success on the Radicals, rather than on the Moderates or the Socialists. It was a departure from the policy of the _Bloc_, though to conciliate the advanced parties he created the new Ministry of Labor and put M. Viviani, a Socialist, in charge of it. In practice, Clemenceau's policy was that of one determined to stay in office, showing alternately conciliation and severity, explaining his actions to the Chamber often with a flippancy which seemed out of place and did not help the prestige of parliamentary government. Apart from the diplomatic tension with Germany, which was not settled by the Act of Algeciras, the history of the Fallières Administration is largely taken up with the final disposition of the religious controversy and with labor questions. The constant advance toward radicalism and socialism, the lack of great statesmen in Parliament and the presence of professional politicians, the progress of anti-militarism and the relegation of the question of Alsace-Lorraine to the background, left a free field for the growth of social unrest. The tendency was encouraged by the elections for the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies in May, 1906. To the religious disturbances and the efforts of the Conservatives to prove themselves persecuted, the country answered at the polls by an increased anti-Clerical majority. In 1906 the Dreyfus case was at last settled. The Cour de Cassation finally annulled the verdict of the Rennes court-martial. In consequence Dreyfus was restored to the army with the rank of Major which he would normally have reached had it not been for his great ordeal. Colonel Picquart, to whom more than to any one he owed his rehabilitation, who had been driven from the army in 1898, was now made Brigadier-General. Promoted a few weeks later to Major-General, he became Minister of War in Clemenceau's Cabinet. The remains of Emile Zola were also transferred to the Pantheon. Such were the dramatic changes wrought in half a dozen years.