Part 22

Thiers now entered on an active career as a politician. He was elected deputy for the town of Aix, and was appointed secretary-general to the minister of finance. His first appearance in the Chamber of Deputies gave no promise of his subsequent distinction. His diminutive person, his small face, encumbered with a pair of huge spectacles, and his whole exterior presenting something of the ludicrous, the new deputy, full of the impassioned eloquence of the revolutionary orators, attempted to impart the thrilling emotions affected by Mirabeau. The attempt provoked derision; but soon subsiding into the oratory natural to him--simple, easy, rapid, anecdotic--he became one of the most formidable of parliamentary speakers. Almost from the moment of his entrance into public life he and Guizot stood forth in opposition to each other as the champions of radicalism and conservatism, respectively. But he was a stanch monarchist, and for a time a favorite with Louis Philippe. In 1832 he accepted the post of minister of the interior under Soult, exchanging it subsequently for the ministry of commerce and public affairs, and that in turn for the foreign office. He was universally regarded as a stronger man than any of his chiefs during this period; but his public and private actions alike were always marked by a certain fussy quarrelsomeness which prevented him from being ever accounted a statesman of the first rank. The spirited foreign policy, calculated above all things to precipitate a quarrel between France and Great Britain, of which for many years he was the chief advocate, is now allowed to have been a great, and might have been a fatal, mistake. In 1836 he became president of the council, but in August of the same year he resigned office, and became the leader of the opposition. In 1840 he was again summoned to office as president of the council and foreign minister. In a few months he was a terror to the peace of Europe. He refused Lord Palmerston's invitation to enter into an alliance with Britain, Austria, and Prussia for the preservation of the integrity of the Ottoman empire, from a sympathy with the principles which dictated the first Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria, and a desire to accomplish by diplomacy with Mehemet Ali what Bonaparte had endeavored to effect by force of arms--the supremacy of France in these regions. He talked menacingly of setting aside the treaties of 1815, and of extending the French frontier to the Rhine, and is said to have actually spent L8,000,000 on military and naval demonstrations. Then followed the seizure of the Society Islands, and a well-founded protest by the British government against the ill-treatment by the French of Mr. Pritchard, their consul at Tahiti. In consequence of this Thiers was forced to resign office, and retire into private life. He now returned to the study of French history. The first volume of his "Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire" appeared in 1845; it was not completed till 1860. This, the most ambitious of all Thiers's literary enterprises, must be considered a large rather than a great work. It is a monument to its author's industry in reading, and rises here and there to rhetorical brilliance. But that it is inaccurate and unfair has been admitted even by French critics. Thiers greatly overrated Napoleon, and probably to his own hurt.

Thiers was not one of the promoters of the revolution which in 1848 drove Louis Philippe from the throne. On the contrary, he would, as prime minister summoned at the eleventh hour, have prevented it if he could. He accepted its consequences in the form of the Republic. He voted for the election of Prince Louis Napoleon as its president. This action brought him much vituperation and ridicule from former political friends. But whatever may have been the motive that inspired it, it certainly did not help him at the time of the coup-d'etat of 1851; he was arrested, imprisoned in Mazas, and banished. Next year, however, he was allowed to return from Switzerland to France. For eight years he was occupied with his "History of the Consulate and Empire." He re-entered the Chamber in 1863, having been elected liberal deputy for the Department of the Seine in opposition to the imperialist candidate. Till the fall of the Second Empire he was regarded as the ablest and most formidable of its more moderate and parliamentary opponents. His speeches in the years between 1863 and 1870 were filled with taunts of the Empire on account of the loss of prestige which had marked its history, and these must not be left out of account when blame has to be apportioned among the authors of the war of 1870, although he opposed it when declared by the Ollivier ministry, and predicted defeat.

The collapse of the Second Empire, however, enabled Thiers to play the greatest of all his parts, that of "liberator of the territory." He declined, after Sedan, to become a member of the Government of National Defence; but he voluntarily undertook diplomatic journeys to Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Italy, on behalf of F