Boulanger came to the front also at a time when the bourgeois Republic (owing to the weakness, incapacity and instability of the bourgeois politicians themselves) was discredited and was believed to be tottering. Clemenceau's own unceasing campaign against widespread abuses and incapable Ministers was largely responsible for this. There was a general sense of insecurity and unsettlement, engendered by the fall of Administration after Administration, due to political or financial proceedings of doubtful character, exposed and denounced by Clemenceau and the Radicals themselves. Some of the Radicals and intellectuals even now supported Boulanger as an alternative to perpetual upsets. Disgusted with lawyers, professional politicians and place-hunters of high and low degree, the people likewise were again on the look-out for a saviour of France who should secure for them democracy without corruption, and honest leadership devoid of Socialism. The old story, in fact. At this particular moment, too, the organised forces in Paris, the army and the gendarmerie, were Boulangists almost to a man. The danger, therefore, of the Boulangist agitation now being carried on alike in Paris and in the Departments seemed to a looker-on to be growing more serious every day. This, however, continued not to be the view of Clemenceau and his party. They thought, in spite of the voting in the Nord and the Dordogne and the apparent popularity of the General in Paris, that the whole thing would prove a mere flash in the pan; that the good sense and Republican conservatism of the French people would display itself when peril really threatened the Republic; and that Boulanger would be even less successful than the Duc de Broglie. Then came the General Elections. Boulanger was candidate for Paris. Once more the obvious evidence of his great popularity was overlooked by the Clemenceau group, the Boulangist fervour went on unrecognised, and it seemed that it might depend upon the General himself at any moment--as indeed proved to be the case--whether he should follow in the footsteps of Louis Napoleon and accomplish a successful _coup d'état_, or fall permanently into the background. But up to the last moment his opponents could not believe that a general with no great military career behind him, a citizen with no great name to conjure with, a politician with no great programme to attract voters, could win Paris or become master of France.