Born in 1797 into a pious, royalist bourgeois merchant family from Marseilles, Thiers was drawn to the glory of Napoleon and the legacy of the Revolution.
A law student turned journalist, he left for Paris, the centre of power and wealth.
He married a wealthy heiress who introduced him to the upper middle classes. This marriage brought him a fortune and a private mansion on the fashionable Place Saint-Georges, where he entertained the important figures of his time.

In 1815, he denounced the Restoration as “the government of foreigners”, yet during the revolutionary days of 1830 that overthrew Charles X, he was among those who persuaded Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, the king’s cousin, to seize power.
As Minister of the Interior in April 1834, he brutally suppressed the second revolt of the Canuts, the silk workers of Lyon, leaving 600 dead and 10,000 arrested.
He established the offence of “political crime” (an opinion crime) punishable by imprisonment and had Blanqui confined in the cells of Mont-Saint-Michel.

Thiers supported “censitary” suffrage (restricted to those who paid sufficient taxes), opposed income tax and the legalisation of workers’ associations, and rejected any reform of labour laws. Louis-Philippe made him his prime minister in 1836.
In 1841, he ordered the construction of Paris’s fortifications, whose cannons also faced inward. He approved the bloody repression of the June 1848 workers’ uprising.

Though he supported Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s candidacy for the presidency, he condemned the coup d’état of 1852 and withdrew from politics during the Second Empire. During that time, however, he greatly enlarged his fortune, notably as a major shareholder in the Compagnie Générale d’Assurances sur la Vie.
Along with the banker Casimir Périer, he came to embody the fusion of private interests with the state apparatus. Balzac said of him: “Monsieur Thiers never had but one thought: he always thought of Monsieur Thiers.”

The executioner of the Paris Commune

After the fall of the Empire, Thiers urgently sought an armistice, foreseeing the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and heavy war reparations.
Hastily organised elections produced a conservative assembly, which appointed Thiers “Chief Executive of the French Republic” on 17 February 1871 in Bordeaux.

But the people of besieged Paris rejected the armistice and rose in revolt. The Assembly withdrew to Versailles, and Thiers organised the crushing of the Commune.
The repression was merciless: summary executions, mass trials, and deportations. For Georges Clémenceau, Thiers was “the very type of cruel and narrow-minded bourgeois, sinking into bloodshed without hesitation.”

Thiers became the first President of a socially conservative yet politically liberal Republic. He died in 1877.
The “Conservative Republic” made him a national hero whose name now adorns countless streets—but in popular memory, he remains the executioner of the Commune.