Jules Grevy
Jules Grevy spent thirty years arguing that the French presidency should be too weak to be worth seizing, and then held it for eight. He was a republican lawyer from the Jura who made his name defending insurgents after 1848, and in that year he proposed the amendment that bears his name: that the republic should have no elected president at all, because a man chosen by universal suffrage would have a mandate rivalling the assembly's and would eventually use it. The amendment was voted down, Louis-Napoleon was elected, and three years later he overthrew the republic exactly as predicted. Grevy refused to serve the empire and returned to the bar. He came back with the republic in 1870, presided over the Chamber, and in January 1879 was elected president after the previous holder resigned rather than accept that the office had lost its fight with parliament. His importance is what he declined to do with it. The constitution of 1875 gave the president the right to dissolve the chamber, choose ministers and direct policy; Grevy announced that he would never oppose the national will as expressed by its representatives, never used the dissolution, and reduced the office to arbitration and ceremony. Every French president until 1958 was bound by the convention he established, and the Third Republic's characteristic instability - a hundred governments in seventy years, under presidents who could not fall - follows directly from it. Under him the republic secularised and made compulsory the primary schools, legalised trade unions and divorce, and acquired Tunisia, Tonkin and the Congo, most of it against his own preference for economy at home. He was re-elected in 1885 and destroyed two years later by his son-in-law, who was found to be selling nominations to the Legion of Honour from an office in the presidential palace. Grevy had done nothing himself and could not see why he should go; parliament made governing impossible until he did, in December 1887, which was one more demonstration of his own thesis about where power in the republic actually sat.
- Lived: 1807 CE – 1891 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
