Boulanger gains the most popularity in the capacity of War Minister.

He introduces reforms for the benefit of soldiers (such as allowing soldiers to grow beards) and appeals to the French desire for revenge against Imperial Germany—and in doing so, comes to be regarded as the man destined to serve that revenge (nicknamed Général Revanche).

He also manages to quell the major workers' strike in Decazeville.

A minor scandal arises when Philippe, comte de Paris, the nominal inheritor of the French throne in the eyes of Orléanist monarchists, marries his daughter Amélie to Portugal's Carlos I, in a lavish wedding that provokes fears of anti-Republican ambitions.

The French Parliament hastily passes a law expelling all possible claimants to the crown from French territories.

Boulanger finds himself in the unusual posture of a general popular among monarchists forced to communicate to d'Aumale his expulsion from the armed forces.

He had received the adulation of the public and the press after the Sino-French War, when France's victory added Tonkin to its colonial empire.

He also vigorously presses for the accelerated adoption, in 1886, of the new and technically revolutionary Lebel rifle, which introduces for the first time smokeless powder high-velocity ammunition.

On Freycinet's defeat in December of the same year, Boulanger is retained by René Goblet at the war office.