Alphonse de Lamartine

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1790–1869 ○ Natural causes

Romantic poet who proclaimed the Republic in 1848 and kept the tricolour, foreign minister of the Provisional Government

Born in 1790 into a family of the provincial nobility at Mâcon, he won fame with Les Méditations poétiques in 1820 and entered the Académie française in 1829. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1833, he sat in opposition to the July Monarchy, and his History of the Girondins (1847), written in praise of the Girondists, was an instant success. On 24 February 1848 he announced the list of the Provisional Government and proclaimed the Republic from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, and on 25 February he saved the tricolour from the red flag. As foreign minister from 24 February to 11 May he pursued a peace policy that ruled out exporting the revolution, and in May he joined the Executive Commission. He won fewer than 19,000 votes in the presidential election of December, left politics, and ended his life in poverty, writing to pay his debts, dying in Paris in 1869.

Also known as: Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine