Synthesizing The Meaning of The Third Republic
Adolphe Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, called republicanism in the 1870s "the form of government that divides France least." France might have agreed about being a republic, but it never fully accepted the Third Republic. France's longest-lasting régime since before the 1789 Revolution, the Third Republic was consigned to the history books as being unloved and unwanted in the end. Yet, its longevity showed that it was capable of weathering many storms.
One of the most surprising aspects of the Third Republic was that it constituted the first stable republican government in French history and the first to win the support of the majority of the population, but it was intended as an interim, temporary government. Following Thiers's example, most of the Orleanist monarchists progressively rallied themselves to the Republican institutions, thus giving support of a large part of the elites to the Republican form of government. On the other hand, the Legitimists continued to be harshly anti-Republicans, while Charles Maurras founded the Action française in 1898, a monarchist far-right movement which would be very influential in the Quartier Latin in the 1930s. It would also be one of the model of the various far right leagues, which participated to the 6 February 1934 riots which succeeded in toppling the Second Cartel des gauches government.
The Third Republic ended in defeat against the Nazi war machine. Historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous book about this, titled The Strange Defeat.
Read more about this topic: French Third Republic
Famous quotes containing the words meaning and/or republic:
“Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: “Here,” he said, “are the walls of the city,” meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed and suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)