Presidents of France 7: Felix Faure (1895-1899)

Felix Faure was born in 1841 in Paris. And unfortunately for him, he is remembered more for the manner of his death than anything he did in his life.  His father was a small scale furniture maker and he himself was a tanner and merchant based in Le Havre, where he became quite wealthy.  At the age of 40 he was elected to the national assembly and sat with the left party.  He was appointed as under-secretary of the colonies in 1882 in Ferry's and later in Tirard's ministry.  He became vice president of the assembly in 1893.  Under Charles DePuy he was appointed minister for the Navy the next year.   

The sudden resignation of the President Casimir-Perier precipitated his rise to President.  He was chosen essentially to prevent the ascendancy of Henri Brisson a perennial candidate who was on the far left and was considered not centrist enough to win. Faure was inoffensive, which was therefore a blessing.  In the year he became President Faure granted amnesty to anarchists who up to then had been living in exile.   In celebration of the Franco-Russian alliance, he received the Tsar on a state visit.   

Captain Albert Dreyfus

The Dreyfus affair broke during his tenure as President, and he sided with those who did not want to reopen the case, which gained him the enmity of pro-Dreyfus politicians such as Georges Clemenceau and the greatest champion of Dreyfus, the writer Emile Zola.  

He died suddenly of a stroke while making love in his office suite with Marguerite Steinheil, then 30 years old. He was 58.  His ingestion of an aphrodisiac containing quinine may have precipitated his death.  Steinheil  was his mistress and was married to a painter , certainly not an uncommon thing for a number of French politicians or even for certain Arkansas governors. 

Marguerite Steinheil

Steinheil went on to have affairs with a number of other important French figures of the age, until finally she married the 6th Baron of Abinger and lived in England.  She also was tried and acquitted for the murder of her stepmother and husband 1909, but with lingering suspicion hanging over her afterwards similar to that surrounding OJ Simpson.

Faure was not mourned by his political opponents who were not above making puns about the supposed sexual behavior that had led to his death.   Georges Clemenceau, perhaps the most famous French statesman of the age, said of Faure that "upon entering the void, he must have felt at home".    He was laid to rest in France's foremost cemetery, Pere Lachaise.

Tomb  of Felix Faure

Presidents of France 6: Jean Casimir-Perier 1894-1895

Jean Casimir-Perier was the French President only for a little over 6 months. 

 He was born in 1847 into a political family, being the grandson of  Casimir Pierre-Perier, who was premier for Louis Phillipe, and the son of Auguste Casimir-Perier, who was interior minister in the Thiers government.  He was chosen as counselor for the Aube Department and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Aube until his election as President.   While his family had monarchist sympathies, he chose to side with left-republicans.  He was under secretary of State for War in the government of Jules Ferry.  From 1890-92 he was vice president of the Chamber of Deputies,  and in 1893 became speaker.  In 1893 on December 9, the anarchist August Vaillant throws a bomb in the chamber but fortunately nobody was killed. In response repressive measures against anarchism were passed in the chamber.  Vaillant was guillotined.

On June 25, 1894, President Carnot was stabbed to death in Lyon.  Casimir-Perier was elected President with support from the right shortly afterwards.  He was criticised by some as being "President of the Reaction".  As Casimir-Perier is a wealthy investor in the Anzin coal mines, he is ridiculed by the left as Casimir Anzin.  

  His unpopularity with the public was such that even his own ministers began to ignore him, and complaining of this, he resigned from the presidency after six months.

After that Casimir-Perier left politics and turned his attention to his holdings in mining.  He was supportive of the accused in the Dreyfus case in Rennes.  He turns down offers of the presidency by President Loubet in 1899.    In 1907 he died at the age of 60. 

Presidents of France: 5. Marie François Sadi Carnot (1887-1894)

Marie François Sadi Carnot was born in 1837 and became President of France in 1887 succeeding Jules Grevy who resigned after a scandal broke concerning Grevy's son in law. He was the son of Hippolyte Carnot, who served in the government of Napoleon.  Carnot's uncle was a physicist whose claim to fame was his achievements in the field of Thermodynamics and Carnot was himself trained as a civil engineer at the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale de Ponts et Chaussees (National School of Bridges and Roads)

He was, because of his staunch republicanism, entrusted with  the prefecture of Seine-Inférieure and was shortly afterwards elected to the National Assembly representing Côte-d'Or.  When Grevy resigned, his reputation for honesty made him the obvious successor winning election by the National Assembly overwhelmingly.   At the outset of his term as President, Carnot was faced with the neo-militarist challenge of Boulanger until the latter was driven into exile.

Nevertheless another scandal broke in 1882 in which the Panama Canal Company's debt problems were concealed from the public by certain members of the government who apparently received bribes from Ferdinand de Lesseps.

de Lesseps

  De Lesseps had previously helped to bring the Suez Canal into existence.  This financial venture, when it collapsed caused many investors to lose their savings, eventually the US bought out the investments and succeeded in building the canal.    

Carnot established a Franco-Russian alliance and was at the height of his popularity when on June 24, 1894 he was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist while sitting his his carriage.  The anarchist, Sante Geronimo Casario was guillotined a little less than 2 months later.

Assassination of Sadi Carnot

  His motive was said to be in revenge for the executions of other anarchists, beginning with Auguste Vaillant and Emile Henry.  

Carnot was laid to rest in the Pantheon after a large state funeral .July 1.    

Presidents of France: 4. Jules Grévy (1879-1887)

Jules Grevy is perhaps the only French President to have a zebra named after him.  English naturalist Emile Oustalet first described one in 1892 and named it after Grevy.   The government of Abyssinia gave Grevy one when he was French President in the 1880s.  The zebra is an endangered species found only in a small part of modern day Ethiopia and Kenya. 

Grevy's Zebra

Grevy himself
was born at Mont-sous-Vaudrey in 1807, a district in Eastern France in the Jura Mountains. He was called to the bar in 1837 and was consistently republican in his sentiments, through the years of the Orleanist monarchy.  After the 1848 revolution he foresaw the neo-monarchist plans of Louis Bonaparte and sought to prevent his ascendancy through constitutional means.  After the 1851 coup d'etat he was briefly under arrest but was released.  He reentered politics towards the end of the Second Empire in 1868 and sat in opposition to the monarchists before and after the fall of Napoleon III and his
disastrous Franco Prussian war. 

When Marshal MacMahon resigned in the face of rising left-republican opposition, Jules Grevy succeeded him in late January 1879.  Grevy announced his intention of never going against the popular will, and discontinued the prerogative of the executive to summarily dissolve the assembly and hold new elections.  He revised the constitution to weaken the executive powers.  The song "La Marseillaise" was officially restored as the national anthem 1879.  During his tenure as President, Grevy oversaw a number of anti-clerical "reforms" including the creation of teacher training schools that were strictly republican in outlook.  Unauthorized teaching by churches was outlawed, which caused many Jesuits to emigrate.  At the same time, for the first time,  colleges and high schools were created for women.  The freedom to assemble without official permission was granted in 1884.  In view of the sad experience of Louis Bonaparte, former members of the royal families (Bonapartist, Orleanist, Bourbon)  were made ineligible to run for office in the republic. In foreign policy Grevy was opposed to the Boulangist movement promoting an aggressive policy against Germany.  The French overseas possessions expanded with a protectorate over Tunisia established in 1881, in French Indochina, and over Madagascar in 1885.

He was easily reelected for a second term in 1885 but soon came to grief because of a scandal created when it was revealed that his son in law, Daniel Wilson, had been selling Legion of Honor awards to anyone willing to pay for them.   This scandal, for which he was only indirectly to blame, eventually led to his resignation in late 1887.  

During Grevy's terms in office and, specifically, on the occasion of the death of Victor Hugo,  he made the Pantheon  officially a kind of secular republican temple, which interred the heroes of the Republic as voted by the National Assembly.   In a similar way Les Invalides included  a secular mausoleum honoring and containing the mos eminent military dead of France.

Grevy died four years later from a pulmonary embolism in 1881 at the age of 74.