He was the second elected president and the first of the Third French Republic. He served as a prime minister in and , dedicated the Arc de Triomphe , and arranged the return to France of the remains of Napoleon from Saint-Helena. He then returned and became an opponent of the government. Following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War , which he opposed, Thiers was elected chief executive of the new French government and negotiated the end of the war.
When the Paris Commune seized power in March , 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 His chief accomplishment as president was to achieve the departure of German soldiers from most of French territory two years ahead of schedule. Opposed by the monarchists in the French National Assembly and the left wing of the republicans, he resigned on 24 May , and was replaced as president by Patrice de MacMahon.
Thiers was also a notable popular historian. He wrote the first large scale history of the French revolution in 10 volumes, published — Adolphe Thiers was born out of wedlock in Marseille on 15 April , during the rule of the Directorate.
His father, Pierre-Louis-Marie Thiers, was a businessman and occasional government official under Napoleon, who led a life of debauchery and was frequently in trouble with the law. On 13 May , his previous wife having died 2 months prior, his father married his mother Marie-Madeleine Amic, with Adolphe thereby becoming a legitimate child, undergoing a baptism by a refractory priest. Nevertheless, the father abandoned Adolphe and his mother not long after.
He showed no interest towards Adolphe, and only contacted him in when he was becoming famous in the Paris journalism scene, to ask him for money. Adolphe responded to the letter saying he feels love and duty only towards his mother, and that only if Pierre can prove he needs the money to stay alive and not for "the most ignoble excesses", would he see what he can do. His paternal grandfather, Louis-Charles Thiers, was an attorney in Aix-en-Provence , who moved to Marseille to become the guardian of the city archives, as well as secretary-general of the city administration, although he lost that post during the French Revolution.
