Félix Faure

Félix Faure
President of France
In office 17 January 1895 – 16 February 1899
Prime Minister	Charles Dupuy Alexandre Ribot Léon Bourgeois Jules Méline Henri Brisson Charles Dupuy
Preceded by	Jean Casimir-Perier
Succeeded by	Émile Loubet
Personal details
Born	Félix François Faure 30 January 1841 10th arrondissement of Paris, France
Died	16 February 1899 (aged 58) Élysée Palace, Paris, France
Cause of death	Stroke
Resting place	Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
Political party	Moderate Republicans

Félix François Faure (French pronunciation: ​[feliks fʁɑ̃swa fɔʁ]; 30 January 1841 – 16 February 1899) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1895 until his death in 1899. A native of Paris, he worked as a tanner in his younger years. Faure became a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Seine-Inférieure in 1881. He rose to prominence in national politics up until unexpectedly assuming the presidency, during which time France's relations with Russia improved. Writer Émile Zola's famous J'Accuse…! open letter was written to Faure in L'Aurore in 1898 in the course of the Dreyfus affair. Faure's state funeral at Notre-Dame Cathedral on 23 February 1899 was the scene of an attempted coup d'état led by French nationalist poet Paul Déroulède, who was later exiled to Spain.

Biography[]

Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of the small furniture maker Jean-Marie Faure (1809–1889) and his first wife Rose Cuissard (1819–1852).

Having started as a tanner and merchant at Le Havre, he acquired considerable wealth, was elected to the National Assembly on 21 August 1881, and took his seat as a member of the Left, interesting himself chiefly in matters concerning economics, railways and the navy. In November 1882 he became under-secretary for the colonies in Ferry's ministry, and retained the post till 1885. He held the same post in Tirard's ministry in 1888, and in 1893 was made vice-president of the chamber.

In 1894 he obtained cabinet rank as minister of marine in the administration of Charles Dupuy. In the following January he was unexpectedly elected President of the Republic upon the resignation of President Casimir-Perier. The principal cause of his elevation was the determination of the various sections of the moderate republican party to exclude Henri Brisson, who had had a plurality of votes on the first ballot, but had failed to obtain an absolute majority. To accomplish this end it was necessary to unite the party, and unity could only be secured by the nomination of someone who offended no one. Faure answered perfectly to this description.

He granted amnesty to the anarchist movements in 1895, enabling the return from exile in England of several famous anarchists, such as Émile Pouget.

In 1897 he met Marguerite Steinheil, who subsequently became his mistress. This scandalous high-profile liaison has been the subject of works of fiction such as The President's Mistress, aired on Eurochannel, with Cristiana Reali in Steinheil's role.^[1]

In 1898 (and for the first few years of the following century) the French automobile industry was the largest in the world. President Faure was not impressed. Invited to address industry leaders at what, in retrospect, is recorded as the first Paris Motor Show, Faure told his audience, "Your cars are very ugly and they smell very bad" ("Vos voitures sont bien laides et sentent bien mauvais!")^[2]

His fine presence and his tact on ceremonial occasions rendered the state some service when in 1896 he received the Tsar at Paris, and in 1897 returned his visit, after which meeting the Franco-Russian Alliance was publicly announced again.

Félix Faure's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery

The latter days of Faure's presidency were consumed by the Dreyfus affair, which he was determined to regard as chose jugée (Latin: res judicata, "adjudicated with no further appeal"). This drew against him the criticism of pro-Dreyfus intellectuals and politicians, such as Émile Zola and Georges Clemenceau.

Freemasonry[]

Félix Faure was initiated in Le Havre, at "L'aménité", a lodge of Grand Orient de France, on 25 October 1865.^[3][4]

Death[]

Faure's death, as illustrated by Le Petit Journal.

Faure died suddenly from apoplexy in the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899, while engaged in sexual activities in his office with 30-year-old Marguerite Steinheil.

It has been widely reported that Felix Faure had his fatal seizure while Steinheil was fellating him, but the exact nature of their sexual intercourse is unknown and such reports may have stemmed from various jeux de mots (puns) made up afterward by his political opponents.

One such pun was to nickname Madame Steinheil "la pompe funèbre" (wordplay in French: "pompes funèbres" means "death care business" and "pompe funèbre" could be translated, literally, as "funeral pump"). Georges Clemenceau's epitaph of Faure, in the same trend, was "Il voulait être César, il ne fut que Pompée" (another wordplay in French; could mean both "he wished to be Caesar, but ended up as Pompey", or "he wished to be Caesar and ended up being blown": the verb "pomper" in French is also slang for performing oral sex); Clemenceau, who was also editor of the newspaper L'Aurore, wrote that "upon entering the void, he [Faure] must have felt at home".^[5] After his death, some alleged extracts from his private journals, dealing with French policy, were published in the Paris press.

Ship[]

The French barque President Felix Faure, named for the President, was involved in a 1908 case of shipwreck at the Antipodes Islands, south of New Zealand, the survivors being stranded for sixty days before being rescued.^[6]

See also[]

• Félix Faure (Paris Métro), a station on line 8 of the Paris Métro
• Si-Mustapha, a town in Algeria formerly named Félix-Faure

Notes[]

References[]

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Faure, François Félix". Encyclopædia Britannica. 10 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 209.

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Félix Faure.

• Works by or about Félix Faure at Internet Archive