Patrice de MacMahon

Patrice de MacMahon surrendered an army with an emperor in it at Sedan, crushed the Paris Commune the following year, and then served seven years as president of the republic he had not wanted. He was descended from Irish Jacobites who had followed the Stuarts to France, and he made his reputation in Algeria and then at the storming of the Malakoff redoubt at Sebastopol in 1855, where his reply on being told the position might be mined - that he was there and there he would stay - became a French catchphrase. He was made a marshal and Duke of Magenta after the Italian campaign of 1859 and governed Algeria for six years. In 1870 he commanded the Army of Chalons and was ordered by Paris, against his own judgement and Napoleon III's, to march to the relief of Bazaine at Metz rather than fall back on the capital. Moltke read the plan in the newspapers, swung two armies around him and pinned the French against the Belgian border at Sedan, where MacMahon was wounded early and 104,000 men surrendered with the emperor. In 1871 he commanded the army that retook Paris from the Commune in the bloody week, with executions running into the thousands. Elected president in 1873 by a monarchist assembly waiting for a king who refused to accept the tricolour, he tried to dismiss a republican majority in 1877, lost the resulting election, and resigned in 1879 - establishing by his defeat that French presidents do not govern against parliament. The crisis is remembered as the seize mai. No French president dissolved the chamber again for eighty years. It is a strange legacy for a man who spent his career carrying out orders he had argued against, and who took the presidency only because the monarchists could not produce a king willing to accept the tricolour.

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