Adolphe Thiers wrote a history that helped topple a king
Adolphe Thiers arrived in Paris at 24 with 100 francs. His ten-volume history of the French Revolution, praising 1789 and damning the old order, helped undermine Charles X and bring on the revolution of 1830. Four decades later, at 74, the historian became president of the new Third Republic.
Thiers entered the world in Marseille on 15 April 1797, to parents not yet married. His father, a businessman given to debauchery and brushes with the law, married his mother weeks later and soon abandoned them both. When the father wrote in 1825, as his son grew famous, to ask for money, Adolphe replied that he owed love and duty only to his mother. An aunt and a godmother paid for his schooling; he won a place at a Marseille lycée, studied law at Aix, where he began a lifelong friendship with the historian François Mignet, and scraped a living at the bar.
In 1821 he tried Paris. After three months as secretary to a duke too conservative for his taste, he landed at Le Constitutionnel, the leading opposition paper, and caused a stir with a combative essay on François Guizot, later his rival. The first volumes of his revolutionary history appeared in 1823 and the tenth in 1827. It sold widely, and in 1834 the Académie française elected him, although a British critic in 1911 condemned its inaccuracy and bias. When Charles X appointed an ultra-royalist government in 1829, Thiers, Mignet, Stendhal and others founded a new paper, Le National, whose first issue came out on 3 January 1830.
After the July Revolution put Louis Philippe on the throne, Thiers twice served as prime minister, in 1836 and 1840. He dedicated the Arc de Triomphe and arranged the return of Napoleon's remains from Saint Helena, and he later chronicled Napoleon's rule across twenty volumes. He helped bring about the 1848 revolution, first backed and then opposed Louis-Napoléon, and opposed the war with Prussia that ended in defeat.
Chosen as chief executive in 1871, he negotiated peace and ordered the army to crush the Paris Commune. As president from August 1871 he secured the withdrawal of German troops two years ahead of schedule, but pressure from monarchists and the radical left forced his resignation on 24 May 1873. He died on 3 September 1877, and Victor Hugo and Léon Gambetta led his funeral procession.
Source: Adolphe Thiers
