Renowned French historian and politician, who was several times Prime Minister during the reign of Louis Philippe of France. He was born in Marseille, in the south of the country, on April 15, 1797, into a humble family, his father being a locksmith at the time of his birth, even though he later referred to his family as “merchants in cloth, ruined for the Revolution ”and died in Saint-Germain-en Laye, on September 3, 1877.
Despite its discreet origin, Louis Adolphe Thiers, received a fairly good academic training, first at the Lycée de Marseille and later studied law at the faculty in Aix-en-Provence, where he began the friendship that accompanied him throughout his life with the historian François Mignet. Although he did not like laws much, it was always thought that he would dedicate himself for literature, a subject for which he had a real inclination.
In 1821, at the time of autumn, he moved to Paris where almost immediately he began to work as editor of the Constitutionnel newspaper, where one of its owners, Cotta, donated part of his dividends, thus guaranteeing him a very generous financial situation. In the years following his arrival in Paris, he decides to collect his articles on the 1822 salon and on a trip to the Pyrenees and publishes them.
Thanks to his articles, he began to be known by the liberal society of Paris and wrote his work Histoire de la revolution française, the first two volumes of which came out in 1823 and the last in 1827, which gives him a solid position as a writer and opens the doors for him. as a politician. Thanks to this work, he is appointed member of the French Academy in 1833.
When everyone was sure of his destiny as a man of letters, Jules de Polignac came to power in August 1829, which made Thiers together with Armand carrel, Mignet and Sautelet they decided to found the opposition newspaper El Nacional.
When Carlos X signs the Saint-Cloud Ordinances by which he abolished freedom of the press, the new chamber, while creating a much more restrictive election law, Thiers publishes an argument against them: “The government today loses all its legitimacy, and the citizens do not have to obey him. As far as we are concerned, we will resist, and France will decide how far our resistance should go ”. Even when the government invaded the newspaper office and wanted to confiscate it, discontent had already spread throughout the city, eventually culminating in the fall of the king and Thiers’ support for the candidate. Louis Philippe of Orleans, which materialized in July.
While holding a subordinate position in the Ministry of Finance, his boss Jacques laffitte he is overthrown, causing a turn in his political position, turning then to the right, thanks to which he is appointed Minister of the Interior, from which he made some mistakes such as the handling of the rebellion of the silk workers in Lyon. Although he changed ministerial portfolio several times, he remained in the cabinet for four years, starting a disagreement with François Guizot.
He resigned in 1836 as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but it was in 1838 that he began a permanent opposition campaign that led him to become president of the council in March 1840 and returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position from which he almost provoked a frontal war of France against the other powers by supporting Mehmet Ali in the crisis of the East of the moment, reason why the king dismisses it.
This sonorous failure led him to rededicate himself to letters, making his Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, the first volume being published in 1845.
Being provisional president of the Third French Republic, a position that he always longed to exercise definitively and not provisionally, he ordered the suppression of the Paris Commune. However, the National Assembly gave him a vote of no confidence in 1873 and for this he was forced to resign, being replaced by Patrice Mac-Mahon in 1875.
He died on September 3, 1877.