Sadi Carnot
Sadi Carnot was elected president because he was the least objectionable man available, governed through six years of scandal and dynamite, and was stabbed to death in a carriage. He came from the most republican family in France: his grandfather organised the armies of the Revolution, his uncle founded thermodynamics, and his father was a minister of the Second Republic. He trained as an engineer at the Polytechnique, built roads and railways, and was sent as a prefect to organise resistance in the east during the war of 1870. He entered parliament in 1871 and was a competent, dull and scrupulously honest finance minister. When the presidency fell vacant in December 1887 amid the sale of decorations, the assembly wanted a man whose name could not be bought and who was not Jules Ferry, whom the left would not have; Carnot was both of those things and was elected on the second ballot. His term was a sustained test of whether the republic could survive its own crises. A popular general spent 1888 and 1889 assembling a movement to overthrow the constitution by plebiscite and then fled the country rather than attempt the coup everyone expected. The collapse of the company digging the Panama canal ruined tens of thousands of small investors and revealed that it had been buying deputies and newspapers for years, which discredited a generation of the parliamentary class and fed the antisemitic press that would later drive the Dreyfus affair. Anarchists bombed cafes, apartment houses and the Chamber of Deputies itself, and parliament answered with laws so broad that they criminalised opinion. Abroad, Carnot's presidency produced the alliance with Russia that would hold until 1917. In June 1894, riding through Lyon after a banquet, he was stabbed by a young Italian anarchist avenging an executed comrade, and died within hours. He was the second French head of state to be assassinated and the first to be mourned by a republic that had spent his whole term expecting to fall.
- Lived: 1837 CE – 1894 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
