Stories in Stone Paris: A Field Guide to Paris Cemeteries & Their Residents by Keister Douglas

Author:Keister, Douglas [Keister, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Published: 2013-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Adolphe Thiers

April 15, 1797–September 3, 1877

Division 55

48° 51' 39.85" N 2° 23' 34.00" E

The biggest tomb in Père-Lachaise is for a small but powerful man (Karl Marx described him as a “monstrous gnome“). Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was born into a bourgeois family. He received a good education and trained in law but found literature and history more to his liking. By age 26 he had published the first two volumes of his ten-volume work Histoire de la revolution française (History of the French Revolution). The last two volumes were published four years later. Although the books were not particularly profitable, they were very popular and thus thrust him into the public eye. He somewhat accidentally became a public figure whose opinions people listened to. He and others founded the National newspaper, which became a platform for his views. In a time of almost constant turmoil, his status in the political realm drifted in and out of favor.

One of his most remembered achievements was in 1840, when he was instrumental in negotiating the return of Napoléon’s remains to France. As the political winds drifted back and forth, he went from radical to left-wing liberal to conservative republican. Thiers was arrested briefly in the December 1851 coup d’état, fled France, but returned and entered political life again where he was involved in stirring up the coals that led to war of 1870. In early 1871, was elected the head of the provisional government only to be supplanted by the Paris Commune a couple months later. After Thiers and the army crushed the Paris Commune, a couple months after that he again became the head of the provisional government and served in that position for two years. Like many high-profile nineteenth-century French politicians, Thiers has his admirers and detractors. His admirers initiated a public subscription to build his massive mausoleum, while his detractors regularly vandalized the mausoleum. From time to time the cemetery has had to sandblast off the graffiti.

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