Adolphe Thiers

French politician

• Born: April 15, 1797
• Birthplace: Marseilles, France
• Died: September 3, 1877
• Place of death: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Thiers was a central figure among the moderate French politicians of the early nineteenth century who created the July Monarchy of 1830 and, forty years later, the Third Republic. He also wrote important multivolume histories of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

Early Life

Marie-Joseph-Louis-Adolphe Thiers (tyahr) was born a month before his parents married. Four months later his ne’er-do-well father, Louis, disappeared and was not heard from again until his son was successful enough to provide financial support. Meanwhile, Adolphe was reared in poverty by his mother, Marie-Madeleine (née Amic), and her mother. The experience left him with a lifelong inclination to seek some support and approval of his actions from older women.

With the help of relatives, Thiers received a proper education, and in November, 1815, he began a three-year tenure in law school at Aix-en-Provence. Thiers became a member of the bar in November, 1818, but times were hard for young lawyers. Thiers, short, almost gnomish, with a reedy voice, lacked the presence to get even his share of cases. He filled his time and pockets by competing for literary prizes offered by regional academies, but his real livelihood was provided by his mother. Prospects were few, and, urged by his friend François Mignet, Thiers decided to try his hand as a writer in Paris. He left his family and a woman who seems to have expected marriage.

In November, 1821, after a brief stint in a secretarial position, Thiers joined the staff of the liberal newspaper the Constitutionnel; three months later, he signed a contract to write a history of the French Revolution. Bourbon Royalism was in the political ascendancy, and the liberals were happy to have new recruits, so Thiers rose quickly.

By the mid-1820’s, Thiers’s reputation as a journalist was established, and the ten-volume Histoire de la révolution française (1823-1827; The History of the French Revolution , 1838) proved him to be a historian of note. He was moving in prominent circles, such as that of the banker Jacques Laffitte, where, along with his future rival François Guizot, he met the legendary Talleyrand. Political discussion was intense, and Thiers’s hostility to the Bourbons and the aristocracy was growing. Although, like most liberals of the era, Thiers embraced the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, commitment to civil rights, and religious skepticism, he still favored constitutional monarchy rather than a republic.

Life’s Work

In January, 1830, Thiers, Mignet, and Armand Carrel inaugurated the National, which became Thiers’s chief organ of persuasion for a number of years. The paper was a leading voice in the criticisms of the government of Charles X, and when the king’s efforts to strengthen royal authority provoked open resistance in July, its offices were a center of revolutionary activity. Although he had spoken for moderation, faced with revolt, Thiers helped to write a proclamation claiming credit for the National in calling France to arms. He worked diligently to get a constitutional monarchy created under Louis-Philippe, the duke of Orléans. That was formally accomplished on August 9.

In the first month of the new regime, Thiers was given several senior-level government appointments and resigned from his journalistic connections. He would serve in six governments over the next decade. Thiers, however, had too little property to qualify. The Dosne family sold him a house in Paris on good terms, and Thiers was elected deputy for Aix-en-Provence and appointed parliamentary undersecretary for the Ministry of Finance.

Practical experience influenced Thiers’s views of government, and by the spring of 1832 he had shifted from the Party of Movement to the Party of Resistance. The death of the premier, Casimir Périer, led to a new government with Thiers as minister of the interior. His delicate task was to control the duchess of Berry, who was leading efforts for a legitimist uprising in the name of her dead husband. She was interned without trial and, conveniently for Thiers, proved to be illegitimately pregnant. The duchess was allowed to leave the country quietly. In January, 1833, Thiers shifted to the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works, and in June he was elected to the French Academy.

The next November, the thirty-six-year-old Thiers married Élise Dosne, who had turned fifteen the day before the wedding. The dowry was 300,000 francs plus, unofficially, the money remaining due on his house, which was simply never paid. The relationship between Thiers and Élise was never close, but Thiers became part of his wife’s family, who gained political and economic influence from the connection. Madame Dosne, Thiers’s mother-in-law, served for many years as the older woman Thiers needed for emotional support.

Thiers’s political influence continued to grow, and by early 1834 he and Guizot were the dominant figures in the government. In the spring, unrest among workers, encouraged by the left-wing press, led to efforts at censorship and arrests for union activities. On April 13, barricades were erected in Paris, and Thiers, as minister of the interior, sent troops that crushed the uprising. Thiers’s reputation was marred for the rest of his career, however, because of deaths that became known as the Massacre in the Rue Transnonain. The Left never forgot Thiers’s involvement.

Elections in June resulted in extended political infighting among the leading politicians, but Thiers remained at the Ministry of the Interior. In February, 1836, the government, then under the duke of Broglie, was defeated, and on February 22 Thiers became the premier. Knowing that his majority was undependable, he kept the chamber busy with noncontroversial internal improvements, while he pursued an active foreign policy in hopes of boosting his standing. After clashing with the king about support for a pro-French liberal government in Spain, Thiers was out of office in September.

Thiers was active in opposition until January, 1840, when, having organized the defeat of the current government, he left Louis-Philippe little choice but to ask him to form a government. Drawing in the Left with patronage and winning the support of the moderate conservatives who were eager for stability, Thiers had what appeared to be a solid administration. He had, however, inherited Middle Eastern trouble. A territorial dispute dating to the Greek revolt of the 1820’s had been simmering between Muḥammad ՙAlī Pasha of Egypt and his overlord, the sultan.

Thiers, the historian, tied Egypt’s troubles to Napoleon I and also was interested in French expansion in North Africa. Thiers backed the Egyptian against all the other powers, believing that Mehemet could get hereditary possession of Egypt and life possession of Syria as a minimum concession. Eventually, the other powers acted without consulting France, and the Egyptians collapsed in the face of a token force. Anti-French feeling spread all over Europe, and by October, 1840, Louis-Philippe, who had never been willing to do more than talk to help Mehemet, replaced Thiers with a government run by Guizot. Although he did not suspect it at the time, Thiers was beginning thirty years as a member of the opposition.

Although he remained active in the chamber, Thiers devoted much time to writing. In 1839, he had signed a contract for a history of the consulate and the empire, receiving 500,000 francs for the first ten volumes. He traveled to Napoleonic battle sites and worked in French archives as he began to write this history. In December of 1840, he was elected to the Académie des Sciences, Morales, et Politiques.

In 1842 and 1846, Guizot was reelected, but there was more and more unrest. In February, 1848, a campaign of protest banquets came to a head when the government attempted to block one scheduled for a working-class district in Paris. Frightened by the ensuing demonstration, Guizot resigned. Frantic maneuvering to reestablish government led to a brief attempt by Thiers to take control, but, when told he was too unpopular, he stepped aside. In the end, the king abdicated in favor of his grandson. That proved unacceptable—Thiers made no effort to support the arrangement—and the Second Republic emerged. Openly reluctant about participating, Thiers was defeated in the first series of elections for the new National Assembly. In May, however, he won in four separate by-elections.

After he was in office, Thiers began to fight for a bicameral legislature, which was rejected, and in opposition to the right to work. He argued that the country could not afford the national workshops, employing 1.5 to 2 million workers, started by the revolutionaries. He established his economic ideas in Du droit de propriété (1848). He grudgingly approved the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as president, but refused, out of loyalty to the Orleanist family and reluctance to face the many problems of the new government, to preside at the first cabinet.

Over the next few years, Thiers devoted himself to conservative party politics, helping with a successful election campaign in the spring of 1849. He helped develop the very conservative Falloux Law, reforming education and a new electoral law reducing the electorate by almost one-third. In debating the latter, he spoke of the dangers of the “vile mob,” a phrase that would haunt him. Thiers openly broke with Louis-Napoleon in 1851 over control of the military, but a prosperous economy and a reputation for stable government kept the prince-president’s popularity high.

When in December, 1851, Louis-Napoleon made himself Emperor Napoleon IIII34IIII III, Thiers and seventeen other deputies were among ten thousand opponents exiled or transported. Thiers settled in Switzerland until August, 1852, when the exile was lifted, and worked on his history of the consulate and empire. Over his life, Thiers produced some thirty volumes of political history. He also wrote his memoirs.

By 1863, Thiers had finished the last volume of his twenty-volume Histoire du consulat et de l’empire (1845-1862; History of the Consulate and the Empire of France Under Napoleon , 1845-1862) and was open for new employment. Napoleon’s popularity was in decline and the republicans were gaining popularity. Thiers was persuaded to run in the following year’s elections. He won a Parisian seat, getting workers’ votes despite his anti-Left reputation. He promptly embarked on a campaign, championing individual freedoms. With the emperor seeking to regain lost support, liberalization was steadily achieved.

The July, 1870, confrontation with Prussia over the question of a Hohenzollern (a royal German family) candidate for the Spanish throne found Thiers arguing for peace. Although he was the subject of jeers when the Franco-Prussian War erupted, the rapid and overwhelming Prussian victory—Napoleon was captured at Sedan, and Paris was besieged by mid-September—vindicated him. Thiers refused to be in the government of national defense, but he accepted a diplomatic mission, visiting London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence in a vain quest for support. He did manage to arrange for armistice talks.

Thiers’s goal was to hold elections and, having established a new government, to make peace on the best possible terms, though France was not in a good bargaining position. He was opposed by Léon Gambetta, leader of the republican Left. Thiers prevailed, and elections were held February 8, 1871, with Thiers’s supporters winning a clear victory. The new assembly elected Thiers, almost unanimously, as chief of the executive power of the French republic. In the peace treaty with Prussia, France lost Alsace-Lorraine and was saddled with a 5,000-million-franc indemnity. One of Thiers’s biggest successes as head of the new Third Republic was raising two large loans and getting that indemnity paid without undermining the national economy.

The withdrawal of the Prussians had left left-wing militants in control of Paris. When the new national government tried to assert control, civil war erupted. Thiers had to raise an army and defeat the Paris Commune, keep the Prussians from taking advantage of the trouble, and hold public support. Although the city had to be shelled and brutality was common, the city was recaptured, and, because the action was prompt and uncompromising, the Prussians found little opportunity to fish in troubled waters. There was left-wing sentiment especially in the cities, but few were willing to chance a renewal of the horrors of 1793. In the end, Thiers triumphed.

In August, 1871, Thiers was appointed president of the republic, a post he held until May, 1873. During his tenure, he presided over the establishment of a conservative republic. He fought unsuccessfully for protectionism and blocked efforts to establish an income tax. He also resisted the adoption of the Prussian system of universal military service. Thiers had become convinced that a republic was the only workable system for a conservative France. His loss of power was largely the result of urging the right to abandon its dream of monarchy and accept the republic. This cost him support, and he was unable to control a confrontation between conservatives and radicals. He had to resign. Thiers spent his last four years active in opposition politics and, on September 3, 1877, after a choking fit at lunch, lapsed into a coma and died.

Significance

Adolphe Thiers’s life can hardly be separated from nineteenth century French politics. He devoted his energies to public service, political journalism, and political history. His biography is really the political history of nineteenth century France, for he was intimately involved in all the major changes of that century. He had made his name in time to influence the Revolution of 1830—he produced more than one hundred articles for the National in the first six months of that year—and became part of the new government. Thiers’s skills, however, were most effective in opposition—as practical politician, journalist, or historian. Thiers spent almost his entire career out of power. The conversational debating style he developed to overcome his naturally weak voice was effective, and he was a formidable parliamentary foe.

During the middle of the century, Thiers wrote history and championed political moderation in the chambers, his reputation for knowledge and stability growing. In retrospect, his rise to power in the crisis of 1870 seems almost inevitable. Not only was he already respected, but also his resistance to the wave of nationalism that led to the war won for him even more kudos. Not only did he deal effectively with making peace but also he proceeded to oversee the creation of a conservative republican regime that lasted until it was destroyed by the Nazi conquest of World War II.

Bibliography

Albrecht-Carrié, René. Adolphe Thiers: Or, The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie. New York: Twayne, 1977. A short, straightforward biography by a very good historian. Does a good job of showing Thiers to be a part of the rise of the middle class to dominance during the nineteenth century.

Allison, John M. S. Thiers and the French Monarchy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926. A major study involving Thiers’s career. The main theme is the monarchy, but, given Thiers’s intimate involvement with that institution, he plays a major part in the book.

Bury, J. P. T. France, 1814-1940. London: Methuen, 1949. A classic survey introduction to French political history. An excellent source for brief accounts of Thiers’s activities, but more important for providing context in which those activities must be seen to be understood.

Bury, J. P. T., and R. P. Tombs. Thiers, 1797-1877: A Political Life. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Excellent biography with the emphasis on Thiers’s public life. The authors portray their subject as a centrist who evolved from constitutional monarchist to republican over the course of his career.

Fortescue, William. The Third Republic in France, 1870-1940: Conflicts and Continuities. London: Routledge, 2000. Information about Thiers is included in chapters 1 and 2, which cover the emergence of the Third Republic and the political climate in the republic’s earliest years.

Horne, Alistair. The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870-71. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. A superbly written account of the collapse of the Second Empire and the emergence of the Third Republic. The author’s treatment of these events as part of the same larger development is effective and informative. Both the style and the approach lend themselves to the nonspecialist.

Mayer, Jean-Marie, and Madeleine Rebérioux. The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914. Vol. 4 in The Cambridge History of Modern France. Translated by J. R. Foster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Chapter 1, “The End of the Notables, 1871-1879,” covers the rise and fall of “Thiers’s Republic.”