page_title: Adolphe Thiers
section_title: President of the Republic (1871–1873)
hierarchical_section_title: Adolphe Thiers / Biography / President of the Republic (1871–1873)
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Portrait d'Adolphe Thiers par Nadar
context_page_description: Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French statesman and historian. He was the second elected President of France, and the first President of the French Third Republic.
  Thiers was a key figure in the July Revolution of 1830, which overthrew the Bourbon monarchy, and the French Revolution of 1848, which established the Second French Republic. He served as a prime minister in 1836, 1840 and 1848, dedicated the Arc de Triomphe, and arranged the return to France of the ashes of Napoleon from Saint-Helena. He was first a supporter, then a vocal opponent of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. When Napoleon III seized power, Thiers was arrested and briefly expelled from France. He then returned and became an opponent of the government.
  Following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, which Thiers opposed, he was elected chief executive of the new French government and negotiated the end of the war. When the Paris Commune seized power in March 1871, Thiers gave the orders to the army for its suppression. At the age of seventy-four, he was named President of the Republic by the French National Assembly in August 1871.
context_section_description: Despite his success with the national finances, Thiers was in a precarious political position. France was predominantly rural, religious and conservative, and the National Assembly reflected this. A majority of the Assembly members supported some form of constitutional monarchy, though they were about equally divided between those who wanted a King from the former Bourbon monarchy, and the Orleanists, who wanted a descendant of Louis-Philippe. There were even a few deputies who wanted a descendant of Napoleon on the throne.
  In June 1871, against the wishes of Thiers, the Assembly voted by 472 to 97 to allow exiled members of the Bourbons and Orleans families to return to France. They were led by Henri, Count of Chambord, the heir to the Bourbon throne, who declared his willingness to rule France as Henry V. He received considerable support in the beginning, but lost much of it when he declared that he would replace the French tricolor with the white flag of the Bourbons. Thiers protested that it was not possible to have constitutional monarchy with three different royal dynasties, the Bourbons, the Orleans, and the Bonapartes, all claiming the throne. The republicans in the Assembly, including Léon Gambetta, rallied around Thiers as a defender of the republic.
  The appearance of the Count of Chambord provoked a political crisis, which worked to the advantage of Thiers. He persuaded the republicans that he was the least monarchist of the monarchists, and persuaded the monarchists that he was the least republican of the republicans. On 30 August 1871, the Assembly voted 494 to 94 to change the title of Thiers from Chief of the Executive Power to President of the Republic, under the authority of the National Assembly. It was a remarkable political achievement; the Third Republic had been created with the votes of the anti-republican monarchists. In private, he was not very kind to the assembly; he told a friend that "I have an Assembly of 150 insurgents [the republicans] and four hundred poltrons (chicken-hearts).  One could say that the real founder of the Republic is the Count of Chambord."
  Thiers moved quickly to set up a strong and conservative republic. The Assembly and government remained in Versailles, until the government buildings in Paris could be repaired. Thiers lived in the Prefecture building of Versailles. He considered moving into the official presidential residence in Paris, the Élysée Palace, but his wife rejected the idea, declaring that "we would be in Paris fifteen days before Monsieur Thiers would be assassinated." He did hold receptions and events in the Élysee, travellng back and forth to Paris with a large escort of police. The Assembly voted funds to rebuild his house on Place Saint-Georges in Paris, which had been burned by the Communards, and gave him money to replace his belongings art collection and library, which had been looted.
  His first priority was to rid the country entirely of the German occupation of the east and north of France. By the end of September 1871, after the payment of 1.5 billion francs, six more departments were liberated, but twelve were still occupied, until the debt could entirely be paid off. The sum amounted to one sixth of the entire budget of the Republic.
  Within the Assembly, the republicans were gaining at the expense of the constitutional monarchists, but they were also divided into several factions, with Thiers usually among the moderate republicans while Léon Gambetta led the far left. The right was also divided into factions, some wishing a constitutional monarchy under the Orleanist Count of Paris, others under the Bourbon Count of Chambord. It was a very unstable mixture. Early in his Presidency, Thiers declared, "In general, the country is wise, but the political parties are not. It is these, and only these, that we have to fear. It is only these which we have to guard against."  Thiers wrote late in his memoirs that he would have preferred a constitutional monarchy, but he knew it was impossible at that moment, given the strong majority of republicans, and s
caption: Thiers, by Nadar
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