Georges Ernest Boulanger

Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, nicknamed Général Revanche, was a French general and politician. An enormously popular public figure during the second decade of the Third Republic, he won multiple elections. At the zenith of his popularity in January 1889, he was feared to be powerful enough to establish himself as dictator. His base of support was the working-class districts of Paris and other cities, plus rural traditionalist Catholics and royalists. He introduced an obsessive and almost pathological anti-German sentiment, known as revanchism, which demanded the complete destruction of Imperial Germany as vengeance for the defeat and fall of the Second French Empire during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), into French culture and accordingly laid the foundations for the outbreak of the First World War.

29 April 1837

Born on the same birth day (29 April): Alina Rosenberg • Bill Slater (footballer) • Carl Millöcker • E. J. Bowen • Egon Kisch • Harold Shapero • Infanta Sofía of Spain • Irvin Kershner • Jack Williamson • Johnny Miller • Mary Theresa Ledóchowska • Paul Adelstein • Sara Errani • Uma Thurman

Born in the same month (April 1837): Algernon Charles Swinburne • Fredrik Bajer • J. P. Morgan • John Burroughs