Jules Grévy

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1807–1891 ○ Natural causes

First republican president of the Third Republic, who curbed his own powers in favour of parliament

Born at Mont-sous-Vaudrey in the Jura in 1807, he became a lawyer in Paris in 1837. In the Constituent Assembly of 1848 he proposed the "Grévy Amendment", which would have vested executive power in a president of the council answerable to the Assembly instead of a directly elected president; it was rejected. Briefly imprisoned in the coup of 1851, he left politics and returned in 1868 to the Corps législatif. He presided over the National Assembly from 1871 to 1873 and over the Chamber of Deputies from 1876, and when MacMahon resigned he was elected president on 30 January 1879. His pledge never to oppose the will of parliament set the pattern for later Third Republic presidents, and in 1880 an amnesty law for the communards was passed. Re-elected in 1885, he resigned in December 1887 after his son-in-law Daniel Wilson was found selling decorations.

Also known as: François Judith Paul Grévy