dolphe Thiers

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Adolphe Thiers

President of France

In office

31 August 1871 – 24 May 1873

Prime Minister Jules Dufaure

Preceded by Napoleon III (as emperor)

Succeeded by Patrice de MacMahon

Prime Minister of France

In office

1 March 1840 – 29 October 1840

Monarch Louis Philippe I

Preceded by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, duc de Dalmatie

Succeeded by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, duc de Dalmatie

In office

22 February 1836 – 6 September 1836

Monarch Louis Philippe I

Preceded by Achille Léonce Victor Charles, Duc de Broglie

Succeeded by Louis, Comte Molé

Foreign Minister of France

In office

1 March 1840 – 29 October 1840

Monarch Louis Philippe I

Preceded by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, duc de Dalmatie

Succeeded by François Guizot

In office

22 February 1836 – 6 September 1836

Monarch Louis Philippe I

Preceded by Achille Léonce Victor Charles, Duc de Broglie

Succeeded by Louis, Comte Molé

Personal details

Born Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers

 15 April 1797

Bouc-Bel-Air, France

Died 3 September 1877 (aged 80)

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Resting place Père Lachaise Cemetery

Political party Party of Resistance

(1831–1836)

Party of Movement

(1836–1848)

Party of Order

(1848–1852)

Third Party

(1852–1870)

Independent

(1870–1873)

Moderate Republican

(1873–1877)

Signature

Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers (/tiˈɛər/ tee-AIR, French: [maʁi ʒɔzɛf lwi adɔlf tjɛʁ];

15 April 1797 – 3 September 1877) was a French statesman and historian. He was the
second elected President of France, and the first President of the French Third
Republic.
Thiers was a key figure in the July Revolution of 1830, which overthrew the Bourbon
monarchy, and the French Revolution of 1848, which established the Second French
Republic. He served as a prime minister in 1836, 1840 and 1848, dedicated the Arc de
Triomphe, and arranged the return to France of the remains of Napoleon from Saint-
Helena. He was first a supporter, then a vocal opponent of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte
(who served from 1848 to 1852 as President of the Second Republic and then reigned
as Emperor Napoleon III from 1852 to 1871). When Napoleon III seized power, Thiers
was arrested and briefly expelled from France. He then returned and became an
opponent of the government.
 Following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, which Thiers opposed, he
was elected chief executive of the new French government and negotiated the end of
the war. When the Paris Commune seized power in March 1871, Thiers gave the orders
to the army for its suppression. At the age of seventy-four, he was named President of
the Republic by the French National Assembly in August 1871. His chief
accomplishment as president was to achieve the departure of German soldiers from
most of French territory two years ahead of schedule. Opposed by the monarchists in
the French assembly and the left wing of the Republicans, he resigned on 24 May 1873,
and was replaced as President by Patrice de MacMahon. When he died in 1877, his
funeral became a major political event; the procession was led by two of the leaders of
the republican movement, Victor Hugo and Leon Gambetta, who, at the time of his
death, were his allies against the conservative monarchists.
He was also a notable literary figure, the author of a very successful ten-volume history
of the French Revolution (Histoire de la Révolution française) and a twenty-volume
history of the Consulate and Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte (Histoire du Consulat et de
l'Empire). In 1834 he was elected to the Académie Française.

Contents

 1Biography
o 1.1Early life
o 1.2Journalism
o 1.3Historian
o 1.4The July Revolution (1830)
o 1.5Deputy and Minister (1830–1836)
o 1.6Prime Minister (1836)
o 1.7Opposition and Prime Minister again (1837–1840)
o 1.8Opposition (1840–1848)
o 1.9The February Revolution (1848)
o 1.10The Second Republic
o 1.11The Second Empire
o 1.12War and the fall of the Empire
o 1.13The government of National Defense (1870–1871)
o 1.14Chief Executive and the end of the fighting
o 1.15The Paris Commune
o 1.16Making peace
o 1.17President of the Republic (1871–1873)
o 1.18Downfall (1873)
o 1.19Last years
 2Family and personal life
 3Literary career
 4Place in history
 5Legacy
 6Honors
 7References
 o 7.1English-text source
o 7.2Books cited in text (in French)
 8Further reading
o 8.1Older studies
 9External links

Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Adolphe Thiers was born on 15 April 1797, during the rule of the Directorate. His
grandfather, Louis-Charles Thiers, was an attorney in Aix-en-Provence, who moved
to Marseille to become the guardian of the city archives, and secretary-general of the
city administration, though he lost that post during the French Revolution. His father was
a businessman and occasional government official under Napoleon, who frequently was
in trouble with the law. His father abandoned Adolphe and his mother shortly after he
was born. (See section below on Family and personal life.) His mother had little money,
but Thiers was able to receive a good education thanks to financial aid from an aunt and
a godmother. He won admission to a lycée of Marseille through a competitive
examination, and then, with the help of his relatives, was able to enter the faculty of law
in Aix-en-Provence in November 1815. While studying at the faculty of law he began his
lifelong friendship with François Mignet. They both were admitted to the bar in 1818,
and Thiers made a precarious living as a lawyer for three years. He showed a strong
interest in literature, and won an academic prize of five hundred francs for an essay on
the marquis de Vauvenargues. Nonetheless, he was unhappy with his life in Aix. He
wrote to his friend Teulon, "I am without fortune, without status, and without any hope of
having either here." He decided to move to Paris and to try to make a career as a writer.
[1]

Journalism[edit]

The Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Thiers' first employer in Paris

In 1821, the 24-year-old Thiers moved to Paris with just 100 francs in his pocket.
Thanks to his letters of recommendation, He was able to get a position as a secretary to
the prominent philanthropist and social reformer, the Duke of La Rochefoucalt-
Liancourt; the man who in 1789, when King Louis XVI, asked if there was a revolt in
Paris, replied, "No, Majesty, this is a Revolution." He stayed only three months with the
Duke, whose political views were more conservative than his own, and with whom he
could see no rapid avenue for advancement. He was then introduced to Charles-
Guillaume Étienne, the editor of the Le Constitutionnel, the most influential political and
literary journal in Paris at the time. The newspaper was the leading opposition journal
against the royalist government; it had 44,000 subscribers, compared with just 12,800
subscribers for the royalist, or legitimist, press. He offered Etienne an essay on the
political figure François Guizot, Thiers' future rival, which was original, polemical and
aggressive, and caused a stir in Paris literary and political circles. Etienne
commissioned Thiers as a regular contributor. At the same time that Thiers began
writing, his friend from the law school in Aix, Mignet, was hired as a writer for another
leading opposition journal, the Courier Français, and then worked for a major Paris book
publisher. Within four months of his arrival in Paris, Thiers was one of the most read-
journalists in the city.[2]

Prince Talleyrand, Thiers' political mentor, in 1828

He wrote about politics, art, literature, and history. His literary reputation introduced him
into the most influential literary and political salons in Paris. He met Stendhal, the
Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt, the famed banker Jacques Laffitte, the
author and historian Prosper Mérimée, the painter François Gérard; he was the first
journalist to write a glowing review for a young new painter, Eugène Delacroix. When a
revolution broke out in Spain in 1822, he traveled as far as the Pyrenees to write about
it. He soon collected and published a volume of his articles, the first on the salon of
1822, the second on his trip to the Pyrenees. He was very well paid by Johann Friedrich
Cotta, the part-proprietor of the Constitutionnel.[3] Most important for his future career, he
was introduced to Talleyrand, the former foreign minister of Napoleon, who became his
political guide and mentor. Under the tutelage of Talleyrand, Thiers became an active
member of the circle of opponents of the Bourbon regime, which included the financier
Lafitte and the Marquis de Lafayette.[2]
Historian[edit]
He began his celebrated Histoire de la Révolution française, which founded his literary
reputation and boosted his political career. The first two volumes appeared in 1823, the
last two (of ten) in 1827. The complete work of ten volumes sold ten thousand sets, an
enormous number for the time. It went through four more editions, which earned him
57,000 francs (the equivalent of more than a million 1983 francs). The history of Thiers
was particularly popular in liberal circles and among younger Parisians. It praised the
principles, leaders and accomplishments of the 1789 Revolution (though not the later
Terror), and condemned the monarchy, aristocracy and clergy for their inability to
change. The book played a notable role in undermining the legitimacy of the Bourbon
regime of Charles X, and bringing about the July Revolution of 1830.[4]
The work was praised by the French authors Chateaubriand, Stendhal and Sainte-
Beuve, was translated into English (1838) and Spanish (1889), and won him a seat in
the Académie française in 1834.[5] It was less appreciated by British critics, in large part
because of his favorable view of the French Revolution and of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The British historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote his own history of the French
Revolution, complained that it "was far as possible from meriting its high reputation",
though he admitted that Thiers is "a brisk man in his way, and will tell you much if you
know nothing". The historian George Saintsbury wrote in the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911): "Thiers' historical work is marked by extreme
inaccuracy, by prejudice which passes the limits of accidental unfairness, and by an
almost complete indifference to the merits as compared with the successes of his
heroes."[3]
The July Revolution (1830)[edit]

The police seize the presses of Thiers' newspaper, the National (July 1830)

A new King, Charles X, had come to the French throne in 1824 with a strong belief in
the divine right of kings and the worthlessness of parliamentary government. Thiers had
been planning a literary career, but in August 1829, when the King appointed the ultra-
royalist, Polignac as his new prime minister, Thiers began to write increasingly fierce
attacks on the royal government. In a celebrated article, he wrote that "The King rules,
but does not govern," and called for a constitutional monarchy. If the King did not accept
it, he proposed simply changing the King, as the English had done in 1688. When
the Constitutionelle hesitated to publish some of his more energetic attacks on the
government, Thiers, with Armand Carrel, Mignet, Stendhal and others, started a new
opposition newspaper, the National, whose first issue appeared on 3 January 1830. The
government responded by taking the newspaper to court, charging it with attacks on the
person of the King and that of the royal family. It was fined three thousand francs.
The writer Lamartine left a vivid description of Thiers, with whom he had dinner at this
time: "He spoke first; he spoke last; he hardly listened to the replies; but he spoke with
an accuracy, with an audacity, with a fecundity of ideas, that excused his volubility of
words from his lips. It was his spirit and heart which spoke....There was enough
gunpowder in his nature to explode six governments." [6]
In August 1829, Charles X decided to show his authority over the unruly Chamber of
Deputies, and named a fervent royalist, Jules de Polignac as his new prime minister. On
19 March 1830, he raised the temperature, warning that if the deputies put obstacles in
his path, he would "find the force to overcome them in my resolution to maintain the
public peace, with the full confidence of the French and the love they have also shown
toward their King." He also launched an overseas expedition for the conquest of Algeria,
which he was certain would increase his popularity at home, and called for new
elections, which he was certain he would win. The French flag was hoisted over Algiers
on 5 July 1830, and new elections were held from 13 to 19 July. The elections were a
disaster for the King; the opposition won 270 seats, against 145 supporters of the King.
The opponents were, for the most part, not republicans; they simply wanted a
constitutional monarchy. The King responded, however, on 25 July with new decrees
dissolving the Chamber of Deputies, changing the election laws, and putting restrictions
on the press. The King, confident in his popularity, neglected to put the army on alert or
to bring in soldiers to maintain order.

The Duke of Orleans arrives at the Hotel de Ville (31 July 1830)

Thiers reacted immediately and forcefully. On the front page of his newspaper,
the National, he declared: "The legal regime is over; that of force has begun; in the
situation in which we are placed, obedience has ceased to be an obligation." He
persuaded the editors of the other major liberal newspapers to publish a joint
declaration of opposition, which was published on the morning of 27 July. Later that
morning, the prefect of police arrived at the National with orders to put the newspaper
out of business. He brought workers who seized key mechanical parts of the printing
presses, and locked the building. As soon as the prefect left, the same workers who had
locked the building and disabled the presses re-opened it and put the presses back into
service. Anti-royalist demonstrations broke out in many parts of Paris. Thiers and his
allies briefly left the city to avoid arrest, but soon came back. Thiers noticed that the
anti-royalist demonstrators had attacked shops which had signs showing that they were
patronized by Charles X, but not those which advertised they were patronized by the
King's cousin, Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, whose family had been sympathetic
to the French Revolution. Without consulting with Louis-Philippe, whom he had never
met, Thiers immediately had posters printed and put up around Paris declaring that the
Duke of Orleans was a friend of the people, and he should take the crown. [7]
With the painter Ary Scheffer, a friend of Louis-Philippe, he rode on horseback
immediately to the Duke's residence in Neuilly, but found that the Duke had left and was
in hiding at another chateau in Raincy. Thiers talked instead to the Duke's wife, Marie-
Amélie, and sister-in-law, Madame Adelaide. Thiers explained that they wanted a
representative monarchy and a new dynasty, and that everyone knew that Louis-
Philippe was not ambitious and had not sought the crown for himself. Madame Adelaide
agreed to take the proposition to the Duke. The Duke returned to Neuilly at ten in the
evening and learned what had happened from his wife. He put on a tricolor ribbon, the
symbol of the opposition, and rode to the Palais-Royal, where Thiers, the Marquis de
Lafayette and Jacques Laffitte were waiting. Together, they persuaded him to take the
throne and discussed how it would be done. That afternoon, they rode to the Hotel de
Ville. Louis-Phiiippe, wrapped in a tricolor flag, was presented to the huge and cheering
crowd in front of the Hotel de Ville by LaFayette. King Charles X withdrew his proposed
new government and offered to negotiate, but it was too late. He and his son departed
the Chateau of Saint-Cloud and left France for exile in England. [8]
Deputy and Minister (1830–1836)[edit]

Adolphe Thiers in the 1830s

When the new government was formed, Thiers, with no government experience, was
given a lesser position, that of undersecretary of state for Finance, under Laffitte, but
was also awarded the Legion of Honor and the position of state counselor, which had a
substantial salary. He ranked as one of the Radical supporters of the new dynasty, in
opposition to the party of which his rival François Guizot was the chief literary man, and
Guizot's patron, the duc de Broglie, the main pillar.[3] To have real influence and
independence, Thiers knew that he needed a seat in the chamber of deputies, not just a
government position. But to be eligible to run, he needed to own property important
enough that he paid taxes of at least one thousand francs a year. His intimate friend,
Madame Dosne, spoke to her husband, a wealthy businessman. Dosne arranged a loan
of one hundred thousand francs to Thiers so that he could buy a lot and build a house in
a new real estate development at Place Saint-George. In return, Dosne received the
position of Receiver-General in Brest. A seat for Aix-en-Provence in the chamber of
deputies was vacant. Now that he was eligible, Thiers ran and was elected on 21
October 1830. Ten years after his arrival in Paris, he began his political career.
He gave his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies, on the financial situation of the
country, a month after his election. He had no experience as an orator; because of his
small stature, his head barely appeared over the podium, and he spoke with strong
Provençal accent, which made the Parisians smile. The long, carefully prepared speech
was greeted at the end with silence, though the content was approved. Thiers worked
very hard to improve his speaking style, and eventually became a very effective orator.
The new government faced many difficulties. It gradually divided into two informal
parties: the so-called Party of Movement, to which Thiers belonged, which wanted the
maximum number of reforms as soon as possible; and the conservative Party of Order,
who, once the new government was installed, wanted no further turbulence. Louis-
Philippe made Jacques Laffitte, an advocate of rapid reform, his chief minister, in the
anticipation that he would soon fail and would have to be replaced, which was exactly
the result. After four and half months of turmoil, The King dismissed Laffitte and
replaced him with a supporter of Order, Casimir Périer. Thiers was out of the
government, and left only with his position as Deputy, which had no salary. [9]
Thiers commissioned Eugène Delacroix to decorate the ceiling of the library of the Palais Bourbon

The funeral of an anti-government figure, General Lamarque, in June 1832, later

immortalized by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, turned into the June Rebellion against
the monarchy, with barricades raised in the Saint-Merry district. After it was suppressed,
Thiers was brought back into the government as Minister of the Interior. He helped put
down a Quixotic armed rebellion of the Legitimists under the Duchess de Berry who
wanted to put the Bourbon dynasty back on the throne. She was hiding in a secret room
behind a fireplace in Nantes, and was captured when the police looking for her, wishing
to stay warm, started a fire, forcing her to surrender. In 1833 he declared he did not
want to be the Joseph Fouché of the regime (the name of Napoleon's chief of the secret
police) and became Minister of Trade and Public Works. As a Deputy, he opposed the
proposal for an income tax on the rich, arguing that it was a Jacobin idea of the French
Revolution. This position won him the support of the growing French business class.
In 1833, he was nominated for an open seat in the Académie française, based on his
ten-volume history of the French Revolution, and other books he had written on the law
and public finance, and the 1830 monarchy, and the Congress of Verona. He was
elected on the first ballot, with twenty-five votes; at age thirty-six, he was the second-
youngest member elected in the 19th century. In July 1833, Thiers dedicated a new
Paris landmark, the column in Place Vendôme. After 1833, his career was bolstered by
his marriage to the daughter of his intimate friend, Madame Dosne, which allowed him
to pay off his one hundred thousand franc loan from her father, finally giving him
financial security. It also caused problems for him, because the aristocracy of Paris
refused to receive her, since she was not one of them. [10]
He returned to the Interior Ministry in 1834–36, and had to deal with discontent of the
growing working class in France's large cities. A workers revolt in Lyon on 9 April 1834,
caused by a reduction of salaries, led to riots and the death of 170 workers and 130
police and soldiers. Shortly afterwards, on 13 April, barricades went up in the Marais
district in Paris. The army was summoned and launched forty thousand soldiers against
the barricades. On rue Transnonain, a sergeant was wounded by a gunshot from a
building. The soldiers attacked the building, killing the twelve inhabitants. Thiers was
thereafter blamed by republicans and socialists for the "Massacre of rue Transnonain." [11]
Thiers also played an active role in the decoration of Paris; he cleared the space in front
of the eastern colonnade of the Louvre, so visitors could have a clear view, and ordered
the restoration of the Salon of Apollo, which became the setting for the famous Paris
salon art exhibitions. He commissioned the bas-reliefs for the Arc-de-Triomphe, and
selected Eugène Delacroix to paint murals for the library of the French Senate and
frescoes on the walls of the church of Saint-Sulpice, despite the opposition of Louis-
Philippe, who disliked Delacroix's painting.[12]
Prime Minister (1836)[edit]
In January 1836, the unpopular government of the Duke of Broglie lost its majority in the
Chamber of Deputies, and the King needed a new Prime Minister. As he had done in
1830, he chose a man he was certain would soon fail; Adolphe Thiers. On the subject of
Thiers, Louis-Philippe told Victor Hugo, "He (Thiers) has spirit, but he is spoiled by the
spirit of a parvenu; he has shown himself to be insatiable." Louis Philippe cited what he
said was Talleyrand's view of Thiers: "You will never make anything of Thiers, but
nonetheless he will be an excellent instrument. But he is one of those men whom you
can make use of only if you give them satisfaction; but he is never satisfied. The
misfortune, for you and for him, is that you cannot make him a cardinal." [13]
Thiers accepted the position, and chose a government, keeping for himself the position
of Foreign Minister. He told the Chamber of Deputies, "Our country is in the middle of
the greatest perils, and we must fight the disorder with all of our force. To save a
revolution, we must preserve it from its own excesses. Whether these excesses are
produced on the streets or in the abusive use of institutions, I will contribute, through
force and by the laws, to put them down." [14] He was given the support of the Deputies by
a vote of 251 to 99. His new government proposed the construction of the first railroad
in France, from Paris to Saint-Germain (though Thiers privately described it as "A toy for
the Parisians") and suppressed the national lottery on the grounds of morality.
Violent opposition to Louis-Philippe increased. A gunman named Alibaud attempted to
shoot Louis-Philippe, who was saved by the armored walls of carriage. The police linked
Alibaud to a secret revolutionary group called "Les Familles", by Armand
Barbès and Louis Blanqui. Both were arrested and imprisoned, but later released, and
went on to much more ambitious revolutionary projects. Because of the new threat of
terrorist attacks, Louis-Philippe decided not to inaugurate the newly completed Arc de
Triomphe, begun by Napoleon. Thiers dedicated the monument on 29 July 1836. The
relationship between Thiers and Louis-Philippe became more and more strained. The
King blocked many of Thiers' diplomatic initiatives, and conducted his own foreign
policy. Thiers suggested to the King that France should follow the British model, and
allow the Prime Minister to conduct all of the diplomatic and military affairs. Louis-
Philippe refused, insisting that France was not England and he was the chief diplomat
and head of the army. Thiers felt he had no alternative but to resign as Prime Minister,
which he did on 29 August 1836. His place was taken by a conservative royalist, Louis-
Mathieu Molé.[15]
Opposition and Prime Minister again (1837–1840)[edit]

The Chamber of Deputies (1843)

Out of office, he traveled in Italy. He went first to Rome, where his friend Ingres, the
Director of the Villa Medicis, gave him a tour of the monuments, then to Florence, where
he had the idea of writing a history of that city. He rented a villa at Lake Como and
began collecting documents for his research. He went to Italy two more times in 1837,
renting the Villa di Castello and going through the archives. In the meanwhile, Louis-
Philippe was increasingly unpopular. He survived three more assassination attempts,
and new elections on 4 November showed gains for the center left, and losses for the
center right. Thiers returned to the Deputies and in January 1839 delivered of series of
speeches denouncing the government of the King, led by Molé. The government was
assaulted from all sides, from the extreme right, extreme left, and center. Molé was
forced to resign and call for new elections, which were held on 2 March 1839. The
opposition won the elections, but because of their diverse views struggled to form a
majority. For three months France was without a government. The most radical French
revolutionaries, Barbés and Blanqui, saw this as the moment to launch a violent
revolution. They had formed a secret organization, the Societé des Saisons, with about
fifteen thousand members. On Sunday, 12 March 1839, when the center of Paris was
deserted, they formed armed columns, and successfully seized the Palais de
Justice and the Hotel de Ville. From the balcony of Hotel de Ville, Barbés read a decree
announcing the creation of a revolutionary government. But the army reacted
immediately, and by the evening the revolution was reduced to a few barricades in the
Faubourg Saint-Denis. Barbés and Blanqui were arrested and sentenced to
confinement for life in the prison on Mont-Saint-Michel.
Thiers saw his moment and ran for President of the Chamber, but was narrowly
defeated by a vote of 213–206. Louis-Philippe, who by this time detested Thiers, said
with satisfaction that Thiers "had the effect of a melon striking a stone". but Thiers still
had a strong following in the chamber. In offering him the position of head of the
government, Louis-Philippe told Thiers, "Here I am obliged to submit to you, and accept
my dishonor. You have been forced upon me. You will put my children out onto the
streets. But finally I am a constitutional king, and I have no choice but to go through with
it."[16]

Procession carrying Napoleon's remains through Paris (15 December 1840). The return and ceremony were
meticulously prepared by Thiers, though he was no longer Minister

As President of the Council or Prime Minister, Thiers kept for himself the title of Foreign
Minister. His most notable accomplishment was to obtain from Britain the return of
Napoleon's ashes from Saint Helena. The idea was particularly pleasing to Thiers,
because he had just begun writing a history of the Consulate and Empire, in twenty
volumes. Rather than making the request public, he wrote to a personal English friend,
Lord Clarendon, who was a member of the British government, saying: "to keep a
cadaver as a prisoner is not worthy of you, nor is it possible on the part of a government
such as yours. The restitution of these remains is the final act of putting behind us the
fifty years that have passed, and will be the seal placed on our reconciliation, and our
close alliance." The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, considered and accepted
the request. The transfer was opposed by some in the French parliament, including
Lamartine, who feared that it would stir republican sentiment in France, but it was
welcomed by the population. A warship was dispatched to Saint Helena, and Thiers
worked on the details of the design of the tomb and the plan of the parade that would
carry it to the tomb, constructed within Les Invalides. The return of the ashes was a
huge success, attracting enormous crowds in Paris. But by the time it took place Thiers
was no longer in the government.[17]
More unexpected news arrived on 5 August, while the remains of Napoleon were still en
route from St. Helena to Paris. Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of the Emperor, had landed
at Boulogne with a small force of soldiers, and had tried to spark an uprising by the
army to overthrow Louis-Philippe. The soldiers in Boulogne refused to change sides;
Louis-Napoleon was captured, taken to the Conciergerie in Paris, and put on trial. He
was sentenced to life in prison, and sent to serve his sentence to the fortress of Ham.
The year 1840 also brought a political crisis between France, Russia and England
because of France's support for Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, Ali was a long-time
ally of France; in 1829 he had given the Luxor obelisk, now standing in the Place de la
Concorde, to France. Lord Palmerston was convinced that the French would not fight,
and sent a fleet to bombard Beirut and threaten Egypt. The French cabinet was divided,
fearing that France was not ready for war; the French army was already engaged in an
expensive military conquest of Algeria. The King made it clear to Thiers that he wanted
peace. Thiers offered to resign, but the King refused his resignation, arguing that he
wanted the British to believe that France would fight. When Thiers drafted a note to
Britain warning that a British ultimatum to Egypt would upset the global balance of
power, and he ordered construction of a new ring of fortresses around Paris.
Palmerston did not attack Egypt, and crisis ended. The fortifications begun by Thiers
during crisis were eventually finished, and became known as the Thiers wall, which later
became (and remain today) the city limits of Paris. [18]
After the end of the crisis, tensions remained between the King and Thiers. Thiers
drafted the King's annual address to the Chamber of Deputies, adding the line, "France
is strongly attached to peace, but it will not purchase peace at a price unworthy of the
nation and its King," and would not sacrifice the "sacred independence and national
honor which the French Revolution had put into his hands." Louis-Philippe removed this
line from the speech, considering it too provocative to other European rulers. Thiers
promptly offered his resignation, and this time it was accepted. A month later, he rose in
Parliament to denounce the King's foreign policy, declaring that France had lost its
influence in the Middle East, and had a duty to defend Egypt against Britain, and Turkey
against Russia.
Opposition (1840–1848)[edit]

Thiers in the 1840s

Once outside of the government, he devoted much of his time to writing Histoire du

Consulat et de l'Empire, the first volume of which appeared in 1845.[3] The book was a
huge success, selling twenty thousand copies in a few weeks. The book was criticized
by Chateaubriand, who called it "an odious advertisement for Bonaparte, edited in the
style of a newspaper" It had the unplanned effect of raising even further the prestige of
Napoleon's nephew and Thiers' future enemy, Louis-Napoleon. [19]

King Louis-Philippe in 1842

In December 1840, Thiers helped secure the election of Victor Hugo to the Académie
Française, despite the opposition of the more conservative members. Hugo was
accepted only on the fifth ballot, by a single vote. When elected, Hugo sent a copy of his
new poem about Napoleon to Thiers, declaring to Thiers that Thiers was "a man I honor
and love; your spirit is one of those that seduces my own. One feels that before you
entered the world of great affairs, you traversed that of great ideas. With my full
sympathy, high estime and vivid admiration." [20] From 1840 through 1844, Thiers traveled
around Europe, crisscrossing Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Spain and visiting he
battlefields where Napoleon fought and meeting people who had witnessed them. In the
meanwhile, his chief political rival, Guizot, the leader of the right wing in the Deputies,
headed the government. He called new elections in July 1846, which Guizot's party
narrowly won, with 266 seats of 449. However, in an ominous sign, ten of the twelve
deputies from Paris opposed the government. As the King's unpopularity grew, he
suffered also a personal tragedy with great political implications; his son, the heir to the
throne, was killed in an accident. His grandson, the new heir, was only a child.
Opposition to the King continued to grow; he was the target of two more unsuccessful
assassination attempts 1846. In the spring of 1846, Louis-Napoleon, disguised as a
stonemason, escaped from the prison at Ham and fled to England, where he waited for
an opportunity to make a grand return to France. Thiers, the leader of the center-left
deputies, began to take a more active part in the Chamber of Deputies. He told a
colleague, "The King is easily frightened. He will only call on me when he is danger. I
will only take the ministry if I can be the master of it." [19] A proposal to make a larger
number of citizens eligible to vote was rejected by Guizot and his government: Guizot
declared to the Chamber, "the day will not come for universal suffrage." [21]
The February Revolution (1848)[edit]
The last parliamentary session of the constitutional monarchy began on 28 December
1847 with the announcement of a military success; the resistance to French rule in
Algeria had been defeated. But immediately, opposition to the government grew. Since
political meetings were forbidden, the left opposition began to organize banquets, large
dinners in public places which were really opposition meetings. Thiers declared to the
Chamber, "Our country is marching with giant steps toward a catastrophe. There will be
a civil war, a revision of the Charter, and perhaps a change of personnel at the highest
level. If Napoleon II were alive, he would take the place of the present King." [22]
The left opposition declared that they would hold an enormous banquet on the Place de
la Madeleine on 22 February. Fearing trouble, Guizot declared the banquet illegal, and
ammunition was given to the army garrison, and they prepared for trouble. Thiers,
believing that the government was too strong to allow an uprising, advised caution and
said he would not attend the banquet. [21] The army commander, Marshal Bugeaud, put
squadrons of dragoons on the streets. The day began peacefully, but by midday groups
of demonstrators were raising barricades on the Champs-Élysées and hurling rocks at
soldiers in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the corner of Boulevard des
Capucines and rue Cambon. The volunteer members of the Garde Nationale were
summoned to support the army, but few turned out. Thiers toured the streets on foot,
and was recognized and cheered by many of the demonstrators. The demonstrations
resumed on 23 February, under a freezing rain. The King remained calm, telling his
sister, "The Parisians never make a Revolution in the winter, and they won't overthrow
the Monarchy for a banquet." As the day advanced, the demonstrators raised more
barricades and confronted the army. The leaders of many of the National Guard units
informed the Prefect of police that they wanted reform and would not support the army
against the population. A crowd of 600-800 National Guards threatened to storm the
National Assembly building. Thiers addressed them, reminding them that the assembly
was democratically elected. The guardsmen stopped their assault, and gave the
parliament members a petition demanding reforms.
Within the Tuileries, the King was uncertain what to do. His Prime Minister, Guizot,
advised him to form a new government under Molé, but Molé declined and suggested
Thiers have the job. "The house is burning," Molé told the King. "You have to call on
those who can put out the fire."[23] The King reluctantly agreed, and sent for Thiers, but
another event that evening changed the course of the Revolution; a unit of the army
fired without orders on demonstrators outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on
Boulevard des Capucines, killing sixteen and wounding dozens.
Early in the morning of 24 February, Thiers arrived at the Tuileries and met with the
King, who was in despair. He met also with Marshal Bugeaud, and learned that the
army had only sixteen thousand men available; they were short of ammunition and
exhausted. During the night, more barricades had appeared all over Paris. Thiers
proposed withdrawing the army to Saint-Cloud, gathering his forces, and marching back
into Paris with a full army (the strategy he followed in 1871 during the Paris Commune),
but Marshal Bugeaud wanted to attack the barricades immediately; he told the King that
it would cost twenty thousand lives; the King told Bugeaud that the price was too high,
and called off the attack. The army columns began to disintegrate, as the soldiers joined
the demonstrators. Thiers urged the King to flee to Saint-Cloud, but the King insisted on
having his regular breakfast at 10:30 a.m., and then put on the uniform of a Lieutenant
General to review the four thousand regular soldiers and two legions of National Guards
gathered in the courtyard of the Tuileries. As he rode by, the regular soldiers cheered
the King, but the National Guardsmen called out "Down the Ministers! Down with the
system!" and shook their weapons at the King. The King abruptly turned around rode
back to Palace, where he sat in an armchair, head in his hands. "Everything is lost," he
said to Theirs. "I am overwhelmed," Thiers responded coldly, "I've known that for a long
time." His family urged him to remain and fight. The King turned to his marshals and
generals and to Thiers and asked if there was any alternative, but they were silent. The
King slowly wrote out and signed his act of abdication, changed from his uniform into
civilian clothes, and left through the gardens of the Tuileries. A carriage took him out of
Paris to Saint-Cloud, and soon afterwards he crossed the Channel to exile in England. [24]
The Second Republic[edit]
See also: French Second Republic

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1848

Once the King was gone, Thiers and the other Deputies moved quickly to the Chamber
of Deputies to decide what to do next. They had not been there long before an immense
crowd invaded the Chamber, shouting "Long live the Republic!" Thiers fled on foot, and
made his way back to his house. A new government was quickly formed by the
republicans Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin, but Thiers had no part in it. The new interim
government quickly decreed the freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and
called for new parliamentary elections, in which all men over the age of 21, who had
been resident in their home for six months, could vote, raising the number of eligible
voters from 200,000 to nine million. The Chamber was expanded to a National
Assembly with nine hundred members. New elections were held; Thiers ran as a
candidate in Marseille, and, for the first and only time in his career, was defeated.
However, on 15 May, the more radical socialists staged effort to seize the government;
they invaded the chamber and proclaimed a new government. This time, the Republican
National Guard responded quickly to defend the government, recapturing the hall and
the government. The socialist deputies who had taken part were expelled from the
Assembly, leaving open seats. New elections for the open seats were held on 4 June,
and Thiers was elected in four departments; Seine, Gironde, Orne, and Seine-
Inferieure. He chose to be deputy for Seine-Inferieure.
At the same time, a familiar name reappeared in French politics; Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, resident in London, was elected to a
seat in Paris by 80,000 votes, and also to seats in three other departments. The more
radical republican deputies contested his election; Louis-Napoleon promptly withdrew
his candidacy and remained in London, waiting for a more opportune moment.
Thiers had been considered a leftist republican in the government of Louis-Philippe, but
after the political earthquake of the 1848 revolution and the influx of new deputies, he
appeared relatively conservative. While he was out of the Assembly, he published an
essay in defense of capitalism and private property which won him the support of the
French business community and middle class. Thiers took his seat as the head of
Finance Committee, and leader of the conservative republicans. In the tense and
sometimes violent political climate, he took up the habit of always carrying a loaded
pistol.[25]
In September Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris and took part in the
legislative elections. Though he stayed in London, was a Swiss citizen he did not
campaign, he was overwhelmingly elected in five departments. On September he
returned to Paris and took a residence on Place Vendôme. The first appearance of
Louis-Napoleon at the Assembly, his Germanic accent and awkward speaking style,
persuaded Thiers and other Deputies that he was minus habens; an imbecile. This was
also the view of Ledru-Rollin and the socialist deputies. The new Assembly voted to
hold elections for a new President of the Republic, the first in which all Frenchmen with
residences could vote. Elections were set for 10 December 1848. Thiers considered
running, but told Falloux, another Deputy: "If I lost it would be a grave setback for the
ideas of order; if I won, I would be obliged to embrace the ideas of the Republic, and, in
truth, I am too honest a lad to marry such a bad woman.". [26] Instead, he made the major
mistake of his political career; he decided to support Louis-Napoleon, certain that he
could control him. He believed that Louis-Napoleon's term would be a failure, which
would open the way for Thiers to run in 1852. On the eve of the vote, Thiers hosted
Louis-Napoleon at his home for dinner. In the December 1848 elections, the moderate
republican Lamartine received just 18,000 votes; the socialist Ledru-Rollin received
371,000, and the conservative General Cavaignac received 1,448,000 votes. Louis-
Napoleon received 5,345,000 votes, or three-quarters of the votes cast.
On 11 December, shortly after the elections, Louis-Napoleon invited Thiers to his home
for dinner, and they discussed the future government. Louis-Napoleon offered the
position of President of the Council of Ministers to Thiers, but Thiers refused. He wanted
to retain his independence as a deputy. He and his wife dined frequently with Louis-
Napoleon in the new Presidential residence, the Élysée Palace. Under the new
Constitution, new elections for the National Assembly were held on 13 May 1849. The
new Assembly had 750 members, of whom 250 were republicans, of whom 180 are
radicals or socialists. There were 500 monarchists, divided about equally between
Legitimists, who wanted a constitutional monarchy under Bourbon king, and the
Orleanists, who wanted a King from the family of Louis-Philippe. The socialists were
impatient with the slow pace of change; led by Ledru-Rollin, they staged an uprising in
Paris, which was quickly suppressed by the army. Ledru-Rollin fled to London. In 1849
a cholera epidemic struck Paris; among the victims was Thiers' father-in-law. Thiers and
his wife inherited a substantial fortune. [25]
In a speech in the Assembly in 1849 Thiers explained his political philosophy: "Unlimited
liberty leads to a barbaric society, where the strong oppress the others, and only the
strongest have unlimited liberty...The liberty of one person stops at the liberty of other.
Laws are born from this principle, and a civilized society. No one person has it in his
power to instantly achieve the happiness of nations." [27] On social issues he became
more conservative; formerly a critic of the role of the church in education, he supported
the Falloux Laws of 1850, which established a mixture of both Catholic and public
schools, and for the first time required that each Commune of over five hundred persons
have a school for girls.

A caricature of Thiers in the National Assembly from the 1850s

The most conservative measure he proposed was a change in the electoral laws, which
required that voters have lived in their residences for at least three years, and required
a certain minimum income. He declared to the Assembly: "Our goal is not to exclude the
poor from voting, but to exclude the vile multitude, those who have handed over the
liberty of so many republics to so many tyrants over the years." The law was approved,
removing one-third of the voters in France from the voting lists. Thiers did not foresee
that Louis-Napoleon, elected by universal suffrage, would later u
a