THIERS, LOUIS-ADOLPHE (1797–1877)

THIERS, LOUIS-ADOLPHE (1797–1877)

The French historian, political thinker and politician Louis-Adolphe Thiers played a protagonist’s role during some of the most crucial moments of nineteenth-century French politics, not least the outbreak of the July Revolution of 1830 and the founding and the survival of the Third Republic in the early 1870s. Born in Marseilles and educated there as well as in nearby Aix-en-Provence, Thiers was always described as possessed of a ‘southern’ temperament. Being the son of a locksmith, he was the quintessential self- made man, the parvenu who was determined to succeed through his intelligence, talents and will-power. He was physically unprepossessing, but his talents and energy won over many influential men who were to help the young provincial rise in the Parisian scene that he entered in 1821.

Thiers worked during the 1820s as a journalist in the important opposition newspaper Le Constitutionnel, and as a historian. His greatest achievement in the latter capacity was

a ten-volume history of the French Revolution, published between 1823 and 1827. In the end of 1829, being staunchly opposed to the reactionary Polignac ministry (which had recently replaced the moderate Martignac ministry), Thiers founded, along with his friend and fellow historian, Frangois Mignet (1796–1884) and Armand Carrel (1800–36), the newspaper Le National, which immediately emerged, in the first half of 1830, as the foremost forum of opposition to the regime. It was in a leading article in Le National (4 February 1830, pp. 1–2) that Thiers formulated his famous definition of the role of the monarch in a constitutional monarchy: ‘le roi règne et ne gouverne pas’ (Laquièze 1997)—the notion probably did not originate with Thiers; it is attributed to Jan Zamoyski. But it was Thiers who made it an effective instrument of opposition to King Charles X during the last months of the Restoration in France. Besides having contributed very significantly towards preparing the country for what turned out to be the revolution of July 1830 through Le National, Thiers proved also instrumental in resolving the crisis once the Paris crowds had over-thrown Charles X at the end of July 1830. It was Thiers who had earlier proposed, in the pages of Le National, that Charles X be replaced by the duc d’Orléans after the model of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. It was Thiers who, during the crucial days of late July 1830, convinced the opposition journalists and then the deputies to opt for the Orléans solution. And it was Thiers who was sent to gauge the intentions of the duc d’Orléans, met with the duc’s sister and returned offering the deputies a response calculated to convince them to offer the throne to Louis-Philippe d’Orléans.

During the reign of Louis-Philippe—the July Monarchy (1830–48)—besides being a deputy throughout the reign, Thiers became a minister several times, and twice served as President of the Council of Ministers (the equivalent of Prime Minister)—in 1836 and 1840 respectively, both times for a few months only, falling mainly due to disagreements with the King on foreign policy. His second ministry (March–October 1840) was marked by a very serious crisis in the Middle East. France’s support for her protégé, the Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, in his attempt to conquer Syria and threaten the Ottoman Empire’s integrity more and more resulted in a confrontation between France and the other great powers that almost led to war between France and Britain, not least because of the populist nationalism adopted by Thiers and matched fully on the British side by Lord

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Palmerston. King Louis-Philippe sacked Thiers and replaced him with FRANÇOIS GUIZOT. During the rest of the July Monarchy Thiers remained out of ministerial office and was the leader of the left-centre opposition to Guizot’s ministry. In the late 1840s he formed an alliance with Odilon Barrot, leader of the so-called dynastic left; they supported the Banquet Campaign of the republicans in 1847. After the Revolution of 1848 Thiers gradually shifted to more and more conservative positions and he came to support Louis Napoleon Bonaparte for the presidency in December 1848. He supported the President’s policies in 1849–50, but, by the beginning of 1851, he had started warning against Louis Napoleon’s bid to increase his powers. He was therefore forced to two years’ exile after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851.

Thiers re-entered political life in 1863 as a deputy for Paris and spent the next seven years being the leader of the opposition to the Empire in the representative body. In the crucial period before the disastrous Franco-Prussian War Thiers had warned against such

a war (being one of the very few to do so).

Thiers’s real moment of glory came after the fall of the Second Empire, following France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. He emerged for some time as the reliable, veteran politician who steered the vessel of the state at its most crucial moments. He played a decisive—if also highly controversial—role in the choice of the republican regime and then in its consolidation. It was he, the former constitutional monarchist, who proved most influential in convincing the French masses to accept what he called a ‘conservative republic’ (‘the republic will be conservative or it will not be at all’ he argued) and who most forcefully insisted on the necessity of establishing a republic as ‘the regime that divides us least’ (‘le régime qui nous divise le moins’)—part of the explanation for Thiers’s successes was arguably attributable to his capacity to formulate ideas in the form of such watchwords or slogans, what his British contemporary, Walter Bagehot, called ‘his brilliant epigrams’, which ‘sounded like statesmanship’, and yet were ‘not a policy, but only a political epigram’ (Bagehot 1968:438–9). But no matter how appealing his epigrammatic statements might have been, his major contribution to the consolidation of the republican regime that he helped establish was his brutal suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, when, as chief of the provisional executive in Versailles, he ordered the troops to attack the Paris Communards. The price in blood and class bitterness was very high, but after this the republic of M.Thiers was not seen as dangerous by the friends of order in the French provinces or among the Parisian bourgeoisie. Thiers became the first President of the Third Republic between 1871 and 1873.