Adolphe Thiers1

Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers (French pronunciation: [lwi adɔlf tjɛʁ]; Marseille, 15 April 1797–3 September 1877) was a French politician and historian. Thiers was a prime minister under King Louis-Philippe of France. Following the overthrow of the Second Empire he again came to prominence as the French leader who suppressed the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. From 1871 to 1873 he served initially as Head of State (effectively a provisional President of France), then provisional President. When, following a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly, his offer of resignation was accepted (he had expected a rejection) he was forced to vacate the office. He was replaced as Provisional President by Patrice de Mac-Mahon, Duke of Magenta, who became full President of the Republic, a post Thiers had coveted, in 1875 when a series of constitutional laws officially creating the Third Republic were enacted.

Birth and early life

Thiers's maternal grandmother was the sister of Élisabeth Santi-Lomaca, mother of André Chénier, of Greek origins.^[1] His family was somewhat grandiloquently spoken of as "clothmerchants ruined by the Revolution", but it seems that at the actual time of his birth his father was a locksmith. His mother belonged to the family of the Chéniers, and he was well educated, first at the lycée of Marseille, and then in the faculty of law at Aix-en-Provence. Here he began his lifelong friendship with François Mignet, and was called to the bar at the age of twenty-three. He had, however, little taste for law and much for literature; and he obtained an academic prize at Aix for a discourse on the marquis de Vauvenargues. In the early autumn of 1821Thiers went to Paris, and was quickly introduced as a contributor to the Le Constitutionnel. In each of the years immediately following his arrival in Paris he collected and published a volume of his articles, the first on the salon of 1822, the second on a tour in the Pyrenees. He was put out of all need of money by the singular benefaction of Johann Friedrich Cotta, the well-knownStuttgart publisher, who was part-proprietor of the Constitutionnel, and made over to Thiers his dividends, or part of them.

Meanwhile, he became very well known in Liberal society, and he had begun the celebratedHistoire de la revolution française, which founded his literary and helped his political fame. The first two volumes appeared in 1823, the last two (of ten) in 1827. The book brought him little profit at first, but became immensely popular. The well-known sentence of Thomas Carlyle, that it is "as far as possible from meriting its high reputation", is in strictness justified, for all 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. But Carlyle himself admits that Thiers is "a brisk man in his way, and will tell you much if you know nothing." Coming as the book did just when the reaction against the Revolution was about to turn into another reaction in its favour, it was assured of success.

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