Jules Simon - Third Republic

Third Republic

Defeated in the département of the Seine, he sat for the Marne in the National Assembly, and resumed the portfolio of Education in the first cabinet of Adolphe Thiers's presidency. He advocated free primary education yet sought to conciliate the clergy by all the means in his power; but no concessions removed the hostility of Dupanloup, who presided over the commission appointed to consider his draft of an elementary education bill. The reforms he was actually able to carry out were concerned with secondary education. He encouraged the study of living languages, and limited the attention given to the making of Latin verse; he also encouraged independent methods at the École Normale, and set up a school at Rome where members of the French school of Athens should spend some time.

He retained office until a week before the fall of Thiers in 1873. He was regarded by the monarchical right as one of the most dangerous obstacles in the way of a restoration, which he did as much as any man (except perhaps the comte de Chambord himself) to prevent, but by the extreme left he was distrusted for his moderate views, and Gambetta never forgave his victory at Bordeaux. In 1875 he became a member of the Académie française and a life senator, and in 1876, on the resignation of Jules Dufaure, was summoned to form a cabinet. He replaced anti-republican functionaries in the civil service by republicans, and held his own until 3 May 1877, when he adopted a motion carried by a large majority in the Chamber inviting the cabinet to use all means for the repression of clerical agitation.

His clerical enemies then induced Marshal MacMahon to take advantage of a vote on the press law carried in Jules Simon's absence from the Chamber to write him a letter regretting that he no longer preserved his influence in the Chamber, and thus practically demanding his resignation. His resignation in response to this act of the president, known as the "Seize Mai", which he might have resisted by an appeal to the Chamber, proved his ruin, and he never again held office. He justified his action by his fear of providing an opportunity for a coup d'état on the part of the Marshal. However, the May 1877 crisis eventually ended in MacMahon's demise and in the victory of the Republicans over the monarchist Orleanists and Legitimists.

The rejection (1880) of article 7 of Ferry's Education Act, by which the profession of teaching would have been forbidden to members of non-authorized congregations, was due to his intervention. He was in fact one of the chief of the left centre Opportunist Republicans faction, opposed in the same faction to Jules Grévy and also to the Radical Gambetta. He was director of Le Gaulois from 1879 to 1881, and his influence in the country among moderate republicans was retained by his articles in Le Matin from 1882 onwards, in the Journal des Débats, which he joined in 1886, and in Le Temps from 1890.