state guarantees to certain of the great railway companies ended
in a vote unfavorable to the Cabinet, which resigned, whereupon
Casimir-Perier seized the opportunity to go too. The Socialists declared
that Dupuy had provoked his own defeat in order to embarrass the
President by the difficulty of forming a new Cabinet, and make him
resign as well.

Two days later the electoral Congress met at Versailles. The Radicals
supported Henri Brisson. The Moderates and the Conservatives were
divided between Waldeck-Rousseau and Felix Faure, but Waldeck-Rousseau
having thrown his strength on the second ballot to Faure, the latter was
elected.

The new President, recently Minister of the Navy, was a well-meaning
man, but full of vanity and naively delighted with his own rise in the
world from a humble position to that of chief magistrate. The extent to
which his judgment was warped by his temperament is shown by the later
developments of the Dreyfus case.

Felix Faure's first Cabinet was led by the Republican Moderate Alexandre
Ribot. It lasted less than a year and its history was chiefly
noteworthy, at least in foreign affairs, by the increasing openness of
the Franco-Russian _rapprochement_ at the ceremonies of the inauguration
of the Kiel Canal. In internal affairs there were some violent
industrial disturbances and strikes.

In October, 1895, the Moderates gave way to the Radical Cabinet of Leon
Bourgeois. It was viewed with suspicion by the moneyed interests, who
accused it of gravitating toward the Socialists. The cleavage between
the two tendencies of the Republican Party became more marked. The
Moderates joined forces with the Conservatives to oppose the schemes for
social and financial reforms of the Radicals and of the representatives
of the working classes. Prominent among these was the proposal for a
progressive income tax. The Senate, naturally a more conservative body,
was opposed to the Bourgeois Cabinet, which had a majority, though not a
very steadfast one, in the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate, usually a
nonentity in determining the fall of a cabinet, for once successfully
asserted its power and, by refusing to vote the credits asked for by the
Ministry for the Madagascar campaign, caused it to resign in April,
1896. The enemies of the Senate maintained that the Chamber of Deputies,
elected by direct suffrage, was the only judge of the fate of a cabinet.
But Bourgeois's hold was at best precarious and he seiz