Adolphe Thiers

Biography

Adolphe Thiers was born in Marseille in 1797 and was raised by his mother after his father abandoned the family. He studied law at Aix-en-Provence, where he met his lifelong friend Francois Mignet, and was admitted to the bar in 1818.

Moving to Paris in 1821, he became a leading opposition journalist at Le Constitutionnel and made his name with a ten-volume history of the French Revolution. In January 1830 he co-founded Le National, and during the July Revolution he rallied the liberal press against Charles X's ordinances and promoted the Duke of Orleans as king.

Elected a deputy in October 1830, he served as interior minister under Louis-Philippe and was twice prime minister and foreign minister, in 1836 and 1840; he entered the Academie francaise in 1834. Out of office he wrote a long history of the Consulate and Empire. Under the Second Republic he led the conservative republicans, but he was arrested in Louis-Napoleon's coup of December 1851 and briefly exiled.

Returning to the Chamber in 1863, he opposed the war with Prussia in 1870. In February 1871 the new National Assembly made him chief of the executive power; he negotiated the peace with Bismarck, ceding Alsace and part of Lorraine, and had the army suppress the Paris Commune that May. As President of the Republic from August 1871 he raised loans that paid off the indemnity early, but the monarchist majority forced him out in May 1873. He sat as a republican deputy until his death in 1877.