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.