Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers ( ; ; 15 April 17973 September 1877) was a French statesman and historian who served as President of France from 1871 to 1873. He was the second elected president and the first of the Third French Republic.
Thiers was a key figure in the July Revolution of 1830, which overthrew King Charles X in favor of the more liberal King Louis Philippe, and the Revolution of 1848, which overthrew the July Monarchy and established the Second French Republic. He served as a prime minister in 1836 and 1840, 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 he opposed, Thiers 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 National 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 Léon Gambetta, who at the time of his death were his allies against the conservative monarchists.
Thiers was also a notable popular historian. He wrote the first large scale history of the French Revolution in 10 volumes, published 1823–1827. Historian Robert Tombs states it was, "A bold political act during the Bourbon Restoration...and it formed part of an intellectual upsurge of liberals against the counter-revolutionary offensive of the Ultra Royalists."Robert Tombs, "Making the Revolution History: Adolphe Thiers, 1823–73," in Historicizing the French Revolution (2008): 79–95 at p. 80. He also wrote a twenty-volume history of the Consulate and Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte (). In 1834, he was elected to the Académie Française.
Biography Early life Adolphe Thiers was born out of wedlock in Marseille on 15 April 1797, during the rule of the Directorate. His father, Pierre-Louis-Marie Thiers, was a businessman and occasional government official under Napoleon, who led a life of debauchery and was frequently in trouble with the law. On 13 May 1797, his previous wife having died 2 months prior, his father married his mother Marie-Madeleine Amic, with Adolphe thereby becoming a legitimate child, undergoing a baptism by a refractory priest. Nevertheless, the father abandoned Adolphe and his mother not long after. He showed no interest towards Adolphe, and only contacted him in 1825 when he was becoming famous in the Paris journalism scene, to ask him for money. Adolphe responded to the letter saying he felt love and duty only towards his mother, and that he would only look into helping Pierre if he needed the money to live and not for "the most ignoble excesses".
His paternal grandfather, Louis-Charles Thiers, was an attorney in Aix-en-Provence, who moved to Marseille to become the guardian of the city archives, as well as secretary-general of the city administration, although he lost that post during the French Revolution. Thiers was of Levantine ancestry on his maternal grandmother's side; his grandfather Claude Amic left Marseille for Constantinople around 1750 to work for the Seymandi trading post, and while there married a Greek-speaking, Latin Catholic woman named Marie Santi Lomaca, whose paternal family originally hailed from Chios and claimed "Frankish" (Latin) descent. Her father, Antoine Santi Lomaca, was a wealthy jeweler who supplied the Imperial Harem, and in 1722 accompanied Mehmet Efendi to Paris as a dragoman. Claude Amic later took his family to Marseille in 1770. Adolphe's great-uncle, born Ange-Auguste Santi Lomaca, later converted to Islam, became known under the name "Hadj Messaoud" and moved to the Indies. Adolphe's grandmother was probably a half-sister of the poet André Chénier's mother.
His mother, born in Bouc-Bel-Air, 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; Thiers made a precarious living as a lawyer for three years. Thiers, who showed a strong interest in literature, 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-en-Provence. 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.René De la Croix de Castries, Monsieur Thiers (1983) p. 27.
Journalism
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. 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's 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.
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 Paris 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. Most important for his future career, he was introduced to Talleyrand, the famous diplomat, 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 La Fayette.
Historian
Thiers 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.
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. 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."
July Revolution (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 politician 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 Constitutionel 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."