Patrice de MacMahon

Biography

Patrice de MacMahon was born in 1808 at Sully in Saône-et-Loire into a family of Irish origin. He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, entered the military school of Saint-Cyr in 1825 and joined the army in 1827. He made his name in the French conquest of Algeria, and in the Crimean War his division took the Malakoff at Sevastopol in September 1855.

In the Italian war of 1859 he advanced his troops without orders at a critical moment of the battle of Magenta and secured the French victory, for which Napoleon III made him a Marshal of France and Duke of Magenta. He was appointed a senator and from 1864 to 1870 was governor-general of Algeria. In the Franco-Prussian War he commanded the main French army, which was trapped at Sedan in September 1870; he was wounded, and the surrender of the army and the emperor brought down the Second Empire.

After recovering he commanded the Versailles army that crushed the Paris Commune in the 'bloody week' of May 1871. In May 1873 the royalist majority of the National Assembly chose him as president, expecting him to prepare a restoration; when the Count of Chambord's intransigence made that impossible, he was given a seven-year term in November 1873.

On 16 May 1877 he dismissed the republican premier Jules Simon and later dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, but the republicans won the elections of October 1877. Increasingly isolated, he resigned on 30 January 1879 and withdrew into private life. He died at Montcresson, Loiret, in 1893.