The Third Republic’s army remained aristocratic, clerical, and antirepublican

Evidence

The republic had never dared to dominate it, even when monarchistic sympathies and intrigues came to open expression in the Boulanger crisis. The officer class consisted then as before of the sons of those old aristocratic families whose ancestors, as émigrés, had fought against their fatherland during the revolutionary wars. These officers were strongly under the influence of the clergy who ever since the Revolution had made a point of supporting reactionary and antirepublican movements. Their influence was perhaps equally strong over those officers who were of somewhat lower birth but who hoped, as a result of the Church’s old practice of marking talent without regard to pedigree, to gain promotion with the help of the clergy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 296

Categorization

• XREF: The army as a state institution the republic feared to dominate anticipates the role of the military and its prestige in later totalitarian movements; connects to how a ‘state within the state’ forms the institutional substrate for later antiliberal politics.