Thiers, Adolphe

(1797–1877)

   In succession, a lawyer, journalist, historian of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, minister of the interior under Louis Philippe, prime minister in 1836 and 1840, suppressor of the Paris Commune in 1871, and the first president of the French Third Republic. Thiers negotiated with Otto von Bismarck the terms for the peace to follow the Franco-Prussian War and was subsequently responsible for securing the German evacuation of French territory by promptly paying off the financial indemnity arising from the treaty. Thiers enjoyed the support of the Versailles Assembly as well most of provincial France in the campaign to defeat the Paris Commune, the military prosecution of which lasted from April 1 to May 28, 1871 and witnessed piles of dead ultimately numbering in the tens of thousands. The fighting killed so many anarchists and socialists that it guaranteed the moderate and bourgeois character of the Third Republic yet simultaneously became a potent symbol to the insurrectionalist left in France.

   See also <>.

   FURTHER READING:

    Bury, J.P.T. Thiers, 1797–1877: A Political Life. London: Allan & Unwin, 1986;

    Zeldin, Theordore. France 1848–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

   CARL CAVANAGH HODGE