Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1803–1878 ○ Natural causes

Moderate republican mayor of Paris and finance minister of 1848 who imposed the "forty-five centimes" tax

Born in Marseille in 1803, he fought on the barricades of the July Revolution of 1830, and on his brother's death in 1842 was elected deputy for the Eure, sitting with the republicans. He was a leading spirit of the reform banquet campaign of 1847–1848. In 1848 he joined the Provisional Government and was named mayor of Paris; made minister of finance on 5 March, he met the run on the savings banks with a 45 percent surtax on direct taxes, the "forty-five centimes", which made him deeply unpopular in the countryside. He sat in the Constituent Assembly and on the Executive Commission. Under the Second Empire he was prominent in the republican opposition, and in 1870–1871 he was a member of the Government of National Defence. He wrote a history of the revolution of 1848 and died in Paris in 1878.