Paul Deschanel

Paul Deschanel
President of France
In office 18 February 1920 – 21 September 1920
Prime Minister	Alexandre Millerand
Preceded by	Raymond Poincaré
Succeeded by	Alexandre Millerand
Personal details
Born	13 February 1855 Schaerbeek, Belgium
Died	28 April 1922 (aged 67) Paris, France
Political party	Democratic Republican Alliance
Alma mater	University of Paris

Paul Eugène Louis Deschanel (French pronunciation: ​[pɔl deʃanɛl]; born 13 February 1855 in Schaerbeek, near Brussels; died 28 April 1922 in Paris) was a French politician and writer.

For thirty-five years, he was a deputy, or member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the French Parliament. He represented the department of Eure-et-Loir. He was twice president, or head, of the Chamber, first from 1898 to 1902 and again from 1912 to 1920. In 1899, he became one of the forty members of the Académie française.

On 17 January 1920, Deschanel was elected the tenth President of the Republic. He won one day after Georges Clemenceau left the election. Deschanel had defeated him in an earlier test vote among the political groups. However, Deschanel soon became ill. He suffered from strong anxiety and deep depression, made worse by overwork. On 21 September 1920, he resigned, meaning that he freely gave up the office. He had been President for only about seven months. Only Jean Casimir-Perier, who served in 1894 and 1895, was President for a shorter time. In January 1921, Deschanel was elected to the Senate, the upper house of Parliament. He died the following year.

Most people remember him because of one strange event. During the night of 23 to 24 May 1920, he fell from the presidential train while wearing only his pajamas. Newspapers and songwriters made fun of him, and later books repeated many false stories about him. Because of this, people almost forgot his long and important political career.

Deschanel was one of the best public speakers of his time. He supported a moderate Republic that also tried to solve social problems, and he was an expert in foreign policy, or relations with other countries. With Raymond Poincaré and Louis Barthou, he was one of the leaders of the moderate republicans known as the progressistes. His life helps to explain how the Third Republic worked. It also shows how cruel public memory can be toward political leaders whose careers end suddenly.

Birth and family

Émile Deschanel, his father, writer and politician

Paul Deschanel's father, Émile Deschanel (1819–1904), was a teacher and writer. Émile's mother was not married. A lawyer, who was probably his real father, did not give him his family name, but he paid for his education. At school, Émile was a friend of the young Charles Baudelaire. He became a strong republican, and when Louis-Napoléon took power by force on 2 December 1851, Émile had to leave France and move to Belgium.

Paul was therefore born in Schaerbeek, near Brussels, in a small house in the rue de Brabant. He was born among French republicans who were living in exile, which means that they had been forced to leave their own country. For these exiles, Paul's birth was a sign of hope. Victor Hugo had often asked when "the little Deschanel" would arrive, and Edgar Quinet called the baby "the first-born of the exile". Paul spent his first four years among men who lived with memories of France and hopes connected with the Revolution of 1848.

In 1859, after his military victory in Italy, Napoleon III allowed the exiles to return to France. Émile began teaching and writing again, but he refused to promise loyalty to the Empire, so he could not teach in public schools. Paul grew up knowing that the Empire was the reason he had been born outside France. Politics, writing, and the memory of exile were always present in the family home.

His father's notebooks describe him as a quick, happy, and independent child. When the Republic returned, Émile was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in February 1876, so Paul grew up among the politicians of the young Republic. Public speaking was one of his father's main talents, and it later became the most important tool of Paul's political career.

Education and first government work

Deschanel as a young deputy in 1893

Paul studied literature and law. He spent one year in the army in 1873 and also studied at the École libre des sciences politiques. He received two law degrees, one in July 1874 and another in December 1875. While still very young, he published serious articles. He wrote about Rabelais in the Revue bleue in 1875, and later about Diderot and Quinet in the Journal des débats in 1877. Like his father, he loved both writing and politics and decided to continue working in both fields.

In January 1878, at the age of twenty-two, he became sous-préfet at Dreux. A sous-préfet is a government officer who represents the state in a smaller local area. His father's friends had helped him receive the position. Dreux is in Eure-et-Loir, the department that would later elect him to Parliament for thirty-five years. His letters describe a young Parisian living in a cold town where he knew nobody, but he began learning practical politics there. He spoke with farmers and landowners and tried to persuade them to support the Republic.

After Dreux, he worked at Melun in 1879. He then became sous-préfet at Brest at the end of 1879 and at Meaux in 1881. He did not enjoy this kind of work very much because his real ambition was to become a member of the Chamber of Deputies.

In August 1881, he left government service and stood for election in Dreux against Gatineau, the deputy who already held the seat. Deschanel offered a moderate program. He wanted small changes to the main laws of the Republic, a return to elections using department-wide lists, and more power for local government. He lost the election.

During the following years, Deschanel travelled. He visited Italy in 1880 and Germany in 1884 and 1885. He also published books about international affairs, including La Question du Tonkin (1883) and La Politique française en Océanie (1884). These works helped make him known as an expert in foreign policy.

Deputy for Eure-et-Loir (1885–1920)

Two events gave Deschanel another opportunity. France returned to elections based on department-wide lists, and Gatineau died in July 1885. In October, the republicans of Eure-et-Loir placed Deschanel on their list, and he was elected to the Chamber at the age of thirty.

The voters elected him nine times between 1885 and 1919. From 1889, he represented the district of Nogent-le-Rotrou, where his support was usually very strong. His opponents received few votes, and only Dr Poupon, in 1910, seriously challenged him. Even then, Deschanel received more than 71 percent of the vote.

His safe seat had one unusual feature. He did not own a house in the department and was never a mayor. From 1895, he was only a quiet member of the department council. However, this allowed him to give most of his time to national politics. His fame in Paris also helped his district, and during the difficult farming years at the end of the 19th century, he defended its agricultural interests.

One fact makes his political career unusual: he was never a minister. A minister is the political head of one part of the government. Deschanel received several offers to become a minister but always refused. He believed that failure in a ministry would have destroyed his career "at one blow".

Deschanel had one main goal. He wanted to become President of the Republic, and he believed that the safest path was to avoid making political enemies. He therefore chose to act as a judge between parties instead of becoming an active government leader. Politicians of his time, including Joseph Caillaux, noticed this. Later historians, including Jean-Jacques Becker, reached the same conclusion: Deschanel's whole career was directed toward the Élysée Palace, the official home of the President.

His political ideas

Deschanel in 1908

Deschanel was one of the moderate republicans. During the 1890s, they were the largest political group in the Chamber. He opposed socialism, a system in which important property and industries are owned by society or the state. He also opposed the main program of the Radical Party. However, his ideas about social problems were quite open and modern. In 1897, the left-wing newspaper La Petite République even called him "a socialist of the property-owning classes".

Mutual help was at the centre of his social ideas. He supported organizations in which workers paid money into a shared fund that could help them during illness, old age, or other difficult periods. Deschanel led national organizations of this kind. At the end of 1899, he described a full social program that included free public offices to help people find jobs, mutual-help groups for schoolchildren, mothers, and women, and systems of insurance and pensions for old age.

On taxation, he accepted the idea of a tax on yearly income, but he wanted it to replace older taxes. He believed that the amount should be measured through visible signs of wealth, such as a person's house and way of life. The lowest incomes should pay no tax, and the number of children in a family should also be considered. Paying taxes, Deschanel said, was an act of respect for the nation.

In trade policy, he supported taxes on foreign goods when French farming or industry seemed to be in danger. In 1891, he attacked free trade and the commercial agreement made with England in 1860. In April 1897, he and Raymond Poincaré started a national committee for trade and industry. Deschanel told the committee that France had to stop the decline of its international trade, improve education, and make better use of its colonies. He also supported small farms and believed that the strength of a country depended on a balance between small and large landowners.

Deschanel also had ideas about government reform. In 1908, he proposed a written list of the rights and duties of government workers. From his first election program in 1881, he had supported giving more power to local governments. He also supported proportional representation, an election system that tries to give each party a fair share of seats.

In 1898, one writer said of him: "He represents almost no group but himself." This independence later became an advantage when he tried to act as a judge between political parties.

His strongest interest was foreign policy. In 1893, he said: "It is not power I am looking for: it is foreign policy that attracts me." He travelled to study countries directly. In 1891, the government sent him to the United States to examine its political system. He also visited England, Spain, Greece, and North Africa.

In April 1912, he travelled in the Balkans. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria explained to him his plans concerning Constantinople. Even Deschanel's political enemies, including Caillaux, later admitted that he understood the problems of eastern and central Europe very well.

Head of the Chamber of Deputies (1898–1902)

Deschanel as president of the Chamber of Deputies

The president of the Chamber held one of the most important offices in the Republic. He organized the work of the Chamber and helped decide its schedule. He ruled on questions of procedure and on votes whose results were uncertain. He kept debates under control and punished deputies when necessary. During every government crisis, the President of the Republic asked for his advice.

After the President of the Republic, the president of the Chamber was often considered the second most important man in the country. The Chamber elected its president again every January, which meant that the deputies could judge his work every year. Deschanel loved the formal ceremonies of the office. At first, this made some deputies smile, but it also showed his serious respect for the position. In his private thoughts, the president's chair was the doorway to the Élysée Palace.

Deschanel had already served as vice-president of the Chamber for a year and a half. The elections of May 1898 then made his political group the largest in the Chamber. Poincaré and Charles Dupuy both refused to become candidates for president of the Chamber, so Deschanel was chosen. His opponent was Henri Brisson, an older Radical leader who had previously led the Chamber.

The election was one of the strangest ever held at the Palais-Bourbon. On 1 June, Deschanel was elected temporary president by only one vote. The count was so uncertain that he himself asked for another vote. He won again the following day, and on 9 June 1898, the Chamber elected him full president by 287 votes to 277. He was forty-three years old.

In his first speech from the chair, on 13 June, he explained his rule: "The man called to the role of a judge must silence his own preferences and rise above his very faith."

His first years as president came during the Dreyfus affair. This was the great political and legal struggle concerning Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer from a Jewish family. Dreyfus had been sent to prison for a crime he had not committed. The Chamber was deeply divided. In private, Deschanel opposed giving Dreyfus another trial. His main reasons were fear for the army and concern for national unity, not hatred of Jewish people.

However, he did not make his opinion public and did not join the attacks on Jewish people. He followed the rule of the chair and did not take a political side. Both sides attacked him because of this. Left-wing newspapers accused him of leading the Chamber in a very unfair way. La Libre Parole, the newspaper of Drumont, spread hatred against Jewish people and claimed that Deschanel had received money from "the Jewish party".

Other people made fun of his love of ceremony, his black formal coat, and his wish to take first place at public events. Even so, the Chamber re-elected him every January, with larger majorities. In 1902, nobody even stood against him.

During these years, he led the Chamber through several serious events. President Félix Faure died, Émile Loubet was elected President, Dreyfus was tried again at Rennes, and the government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau came to power. However, the elections of 1902 gave control of the Chamber to the left. On 1 June 1902, Léon Bourgeois defeated Deschanel for the presidency of the Chamber by 303 votes to 267. The defeat was painful for Deschanel because he had believed that the chair was his final step before becoming President of the Republic.

Writer, marriage and family

Deschanel in the green coat of the Académie française

Deschanel was also a well-known figure in the high society and literary world of Belle Époque Paris. His elegant clothes caused many jokes in the Chamber. His friends included Anna de Noailles, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Pierre Bonnard.

In 1899, while he was president of the Chamber, he was elected to the Académie française. This society of forty writers is one of the highest honours in French literature. His main rivals were Émile Faguet and René Bazin. Hostile newspapers said that his books were less impressive than his ability to please important people. His father, who was probably the stronger writer, had never been elected. In 1914, Deschanel also became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.

In February 1901, at the age of forty-six, he married Germaine Brice, who was twenty-five. She was the daughter of René Brice, a deputy and businessman. The civil wedding took place on 13 February, Deschanel's birthday. The witnesses were President Émile Loubet and the elderly writer Ernest Legouvé. The church wedding took place on 16 February at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and became one of the great social events of the year.

Like many marriages among moderate republicans, it joined the political world of the Republic with the world of business and money. The marriage brought Deschanel one million francs and a regular yearly income. Before this, he had lived mainly on his salary as a deputy.

The couple had three children: Renée-Antoinette, born in 1902; Émile-Jean, born in 1904; and Louis-Paul, born in 1909. Deschanel worked hard, rising at six every morning, and closely supervised his children's education.

Émile-Jean became a deputy for Eure-et-Loir in 1932. After 1944, he was forbidden from taking part in public life because he had voted in 1940 to give full powers to Marshal Pétain. Louis-Paul became a historian. He was one of the first French soldiers killed at the beginning of the Second World War, in September 1939.

1913 and the return to the chair

After 1902, Deschanel spent ten quieter years in politics. He gave important speeches about social questions and foreign policy, but the left controlled the Chamber and paid limited attention to him.

His first serious attempt to become President of the Republic came in January 1913, when Armand Fallières's term was ending. At a test vote among the left-wing political groups, Deschanel received only 83 votes. He was far behind Poincaré, Pams, and Dubost, so he withdrew.

Opponents of Poincaré then asked Deschanel to remain as a second candidate at the final vote in Versailles. Deschanel refused to take part in a political plan that he considered dishonourable. Poincaré was elected President on 17 January 1913. Deschanel felt the defeat deeply and said during the summer: "Fate has been mean and unfair to me." Newspaper attacks from both the left and the right made the situation worse. For a time, they also damaged his old friendship with Poincaré.

One source of comfort had come the previous year. In May 1912, after the death of Henri Brisson, the Chamber had elected Deschanel as its president again. He remained president of the Chamber, winning another vote every January, until 1920. He therefore led it throughout the whole of the Great War.

The Chamber in the Great War

Public print of the speeches given by Deschanel and Clemenceau in the Chamber on 18 October 1918

The war changed Deschanel's office. He became more than a person who simply kept debates in order. He defended the rights of the Chamber against the government and the army leadership, which often wanted to make decisions without Parliament. Deschanel believed that Parliament should closely control the conduct of the war.

In January 1915, he said: "If Parliament had dared more, if it had known more, France would be better off." This opinion created some distance between him and Poincaré, who was less willing to let Parliament discuss military questions.

From June 1916, Deschanel led the secret meetings of the Chamber. During these meetings, deputies learned the truth about failed military attacks. In 1917, they discovered the enormous number of soldiers killed during the operations ordered by General Robert Nivelle. Deschanel had to control their anger.

He also gave speeches in memory of deputies killed at the front. They included Émile Driant, killed during the Battle of Verdun, and Abel Ferry. He also prepared the Chamber's official tribute to the airman Georges Guynemer, although Guynemer had not been a deputy.

Deschanel became one of the most important public voices of wartime France. Between 1914 and 1918, his speeches and writings praised national unity, defended the French claim to Alsace-Lorraine, and described the suffering of Belgium. In 1915, he spoke publicly against the mass killing of the Armenians.

After the war, his speeches were collected in a book called La France victorieuse. One newspaper called him "the very voice of the fatherland". His private notes, however, were much darker. He understood how badly prepared France had been before 1914 and also had serious doubts about the Treaty of Versailles. After leaving the presidency, he prepared a speech attacking the way the treaty had been written, but he died before he could give it in the Senate.

Elected President (January 1920)

The two houses meeting at Versailles for the presidential vote on 17 January 1920

The elections of 16 November 1919 gave France a Chamber controlled by the right and the centre. It was called the "blue horizon" Chamber, after the colour of French soldiers' uniforms. The Senate remained more to the left after one third of its members were elected again in January 1920, and it chose Léon Bourgeois as its president.

Poincaré's term as President of the Republic was ending. Most people expected Georges Clemenceau to replace him. Clemenceau had led the government during the final part of the war and was known as the "Father of Victory". However, many politicians opposed him.

Catholic deputies feared Clemenceau because he had long fought against the political power of the Church. Aristide Briand quietly helped spread the idea that, if Clemenceau became President, he might one day be buried without a church service. Some members of the Radical Party had not forgiven Clemenceau for his attacks on Caillaux and Malvy. All the socialists opposed him, and many deputies and senators were also tired of his hard behaviour and cutting words.

Deschanel seemed to be the right choice for politicians who wanted the Republic to return to its older habits after the war. He was elected temporary president of the new Chamber on 18 December 1919. On 13 January 1920, he was elected full president. During the meeting, his supporters shouted "À Versailles!", meaning that they wanted him to stand in the presidential election.

Deschanel acted quietly and carefully, with active help from Briand. He was friendly toward every political group. He had never sent police or soldiers against striking workers and supported fairer voting systems. He gave soft and unclear answers to left-wing leaders such as Édouard Herriot and Léon Blum about possible new relations with the Vatican, the centre of the Catholic Church. At the same time, he allowed Catholic deputies to believe that he supported their position.

On 16 January 1920, at the test meeting of the republican political groups, Deschanel received more votes than Clemenceau. Clemenceau immediately withdrew. The following day, the two houses of Parliament met at Versailles and elected Deschanel President of the Republic. He received 734 votes, more than any earlier President.

Newspapers described the vote as a sign of national unity. Historians such as Jean-Jacques Becker have seen it differently. For them, Parliament had chosen a mainly ceremonial President, similar to Fallières. In Becker's words, it showed that the political spirit of the Bloc national was "dead at birth". Clemenceau was deeply hurt and immediately resigned as head of the government. Alexandre Millerand formed the new government.

Seven months as President

Deschanel takes office as President in February 1920

A tired and sad man

Deschanel entered the Élysée Palace in February 1920. He was sixty-five years old and physically exhausted. Eight years as president of the Chamber during wartime had badly affected his nerves. The presidential campaign had added more pressure, and he had also spent almost all his free time writing a book about Gambetta.

After becoming President, he discovered a painful fact. Under the constitutional laws of 1875, especially as they had been used since Jules Grévy, the President had almost no real political power. Deschanel had directed his whole life toward this office, but now he understood that he could do very little.

He began to have dark thoughts and felt that he was betraying the trust that Parliament had placed in him. Physical signs followed. He felt pressure in his chest, his heart raced, and he suffered attacks of fear. He described the feeling as "a flame inside my chest".

Even so, his first months were busy. He led meetings of Millerand's ministers during a spring of major railway and coal strikes and made official journeys around France. Crowds liked his simple, warm, and open manner. He supported a careful return to official relations with the Vatican and later said that this was one of the things he had personally achieved as President.

However, a journey through southern France in April 1920 showed his poor condition. People close to him saw a man exhausted by official ceremonies and police protection. He could be friendly at one moment and frightened the next. He was a man of ideas and speeches, and the difference between his lifelong dream of the presidency and the small real power of the office affected him deeply.

The fall from the train near Montargis (night of 23–24 May 1920)

The front page of Le Petit Parisien on 25 May 1920, reporting the President's fall

The event that came to define Deschanel's public memory happened during a journey to Montbrison. He was travelling there to open a monument to Reymond, a senator and airman who had been killed in the war. Deschanel had influenza and at first did not want to make the journey.

On the evening of Sunday 23 May, the special presidential train left the Gare de Lyon. Deschanel took a calming medicine and went to bed. The railway carriage was too hot, the night was stormy, and he slept badly. At about 11:10 p.m., he woke in a confused, half-asleep state and got up to find fresh air.

With difficulty, he opened the window in his room. It was a low window that moved up and down, with nothing strong to hold. At that moment, because of repair work on the railway line, the train slowed to about fifty kilometres per hour. Deschanel leaned out of the window and fell from the train. He landed on the stones beside the railway at kilometre 110.9, before Montargis.

His face was bleeding, but he had no serious wound. He walked along the railway line and met a railway worker called André Radeau, who was making his night inspection. "I am the President of the Republic and I have fallen from the train," Deschanel told him. Radeau thought that he was drunk but took him to the house of another railway worker, Gustave Dariot.

Mme Dariot cleaned Deschanel's cuts. She decided that the unknown man must be a gentleman because, as she said, "his feet are clean". Meanwhile, the presidential train continued without him. At Moulins, officials counted the fifty-three members of the President's party, and everyone was present. However, nobody dared to wake the fifty-fourth person, the President. His absence was only discovered in the morning, when messages from local railway stations reached the train.

The government examined the event and said that it had been an accident. The design of the presidential railway carriage had made the fall easier. Poincaré gave the same explanation publicly in the Senate.

The accident badly damaged Deschanel's public image. Some newspapers were honestly worried about his health. However, satirical newspapers, which make jokes about public people, enjoyed the story. Le Canard enchaîné printed the title of a song: "Mais n'te promène donc pas en pyjama", meaning "Do not go walking in your pajamas". L'Action française suggested that the President should have pajamas in the national colours, and singers wrote comic songs about the railway worker and the President's nightclothes.

A cruel joke was said to come from Clemenceau: "That does not surprise me. M. Deschanel was always in a hurry to arrive." Almost the only important public figure who defended him was Poincaré. He said that the nation's "highest judge" should not be treated in this way.

Deschanel led the ministers' meeting on the day after the accident. However, he now understood that he needed complete rest. He offered to resign, but Millerand refused because he believed that a few quiet months would allow him to recover.

Rambouillet and the end (September 1920)

Deschanel did not improve during the summer. After spending time with his family in Normandy, he went in July to rest at the castle of Rambouillet. There, his depression became worse. He knew that people were saying he was mad.

At dawn on 10 September 1920, he went into the park while only partly dressed. Without clearly knowing what he was doing, he entered a pond until the water reached his waist. A man who saw him later said: "You could see he was thinking too much."

The story quickly became public. Some journalists protested against the cruel treatment of a sick man. However, this time Millerand agreed that Deschanel had to leave office.

On 21 September 1920, Raoul Péret read the President's message to the Chamber, and Léon Bourgeois read it to the Senate. Deschanel said that resigning was the most painful but also the most necessary act he had ever performed. Both houses of Parliament sent him their respect and good wishes and called him a loyal servant of the country.

On 23 September, Parliament met at Versailles and elected Alexandre Millerand as President. The constitutional laws of 1875 had no rule for dealing with a President who was too ill to continue. Deschanel's voluntary resignation solved the problem. Despite what some later books claimed, nobody ever removed him from office by force.

His illness: true and false stories

For many years, books and newspapers repeated strange stories about Deschanel while he was ill. They said that he climbed trees in front of politicians, welcomed a foreign ambassador while wearing nothing except the red band of the Légion d'honneur, and signed official documents with the name "Napoléon".

Researchers searched the French national archives under the direction of Jean Favier. They found no document, witness statement, or reliable newspaper report supporting any of these stories. The stories were inventions. They appeared after the real events and became more extreme as later books repeated them.

The medical evidence gives a different picture. A medical thesis written by Gérard Milleret in Dijon in 1981 and the research of Pierre Rentchnick on the illnesses of political leaders reached the same conclusion. Deschanel suffered from serious anxiety and depression caused by overwork. There was no evidence that he was mad.

The events at Montargis and Rambouillet were short periods of mental confusion. They were caused by his exhausted condition and by the medicines he was taking. A report written in 1950 by one of his doctors reached the same conclusion. Deschanel himself told the abbé Mugnier that his illness was anxiety. It had become worse because, as he said, "the President of the Republic can do nothing".

He recovered. Three months of rest at a sanatorium in Rueil-Malmaison helped him return to health. A sanatorium is a place where ill people rest and receive treatment. Georges Feydeau and Maurice Ravel had also stayed there.

Deschanel understood the damage the illness had done to his public image. Someone told him that being ill was nothing to be ashamed of. He answered: "For other men, no. But for a President of the Republic, yes!"

Senator and death (1921–1922)

Deschanel on 31 December 1920, during his first public appearance after his illness

After recovering, Deschanel refused to live a quiet retired life. He returned to his places in the two academies and then stood for election to the Senate in Eure-et-Loir.

His first public appearance took place before the voters on 31 December 1920. Newspapers noted the strength and clarity of his speech. He said: "From the day a cruel illness made me give up the presidency of the Republic, I have lived apart from the world. I wanted my first visit to be for you."

On 9 January 1921, Eure-et-Loir elected him to Parliament for the tenth time. He was now a senator.

In the Senate, he prepared for a real political return. He planned a major public questioning of the government about foreign policy. Poincaré, who was now head of the government, agreed to the debate at the end of March 1922.

The Revue des Deux Mondes published Deschanel's planned speech after his death. It strongly attacked the way the peace treaty had been written. Deschanel wrote that four men had taken control of the future "of France, of Europe and of the world". They had excluded the smaller allied nations from the discussions. For Deschanel, this was against the principle of open government controlled by Parliament.

The text also answered the British government of David Lloyd George, which described France as a danger to peace. Politicians were worried about the speech. The Senate's session was quickly closed at the beginning of April 1922, and the speech was delayed for several months.

Deschanel never gave it. He died in Paris on 28 April 1922 from a chest illness that followed an operation. He was sixty-seven years old.

Deschanel's grave at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris

His funeral took place on 3 May 1922 at the church of Saint-Honoré-d'Eylau. He received military honours. The government attended, together with Poincaré, Marshals Foch and Franchet d'Esperey, foreign representatives, and a large, silent crowd.

By Deschanel's own wish, nobody gave a speech over his grave in Montparnasse Cemetery. One of the greatest public speakers of the Republic was buried without a single speech.

His voice and his books

Deschanel first became famous because of his speaking voice. His father, who was himself a public lecturer, had trained him from childhood. Deschanel's style of speaking was rich, formal, and full of carefully chosen words. He prepared every speech closely.

His style worked best during great public occasions. It could sometimes seem too grand for ordinary political debates. A newspaper article from 1893 described him as a child "nursed on eloquence", working in a room watched over by statues of Chateaubriand and Voltaire. He was both a man of literature and a politician.

His books followed his two main interests. On foreign policy, he wrote early studies about Talleyrand and Frederick II. He then published La Question du Tonkin in 1883, La Politique française en Océanie in 1884, and other works about French interests in the Pacific.

On social questions and government, he published La République nouvelle and La Question sociale, both in 1898. He also published speeches about local government, mutual-help organizations, and government reform. The First World War produced La France victorieuse, a collection of his wartime speeches from 1914 to 1919.

During the years before his presidency, he wrote Gambetta, a biography of one of the founders of the Republic. Deschanel saw Gambetta as a model of public speaking and love of country.

The Académie française elected Deschanel in 1899 less because he was a great creative writer than because he was an ideal example of the educated public man of the Third Republic.

His place in history

Public memory judged Deschanel's life from its ending. For twenty-five years, he had been one of the best-known people in French politics. He led the Chamber during some of the most difficult periods of the Republic.

However, most people now remember another picture. He is remembered as the President who fell from a train and as the man whom people wrongly said was mad. He became the subject of a comic song about a railway worker. At every French presidential election, the same stories return, although most of them are false.

His whole life is often judged through the seven months he spent as President in 1920. Deschanel himself had understood that ridicule could destroy a public figure. It had already harmed Presidents Mac-Mahon and Félix Faure.

More recent historical work has corrected many false ideas about him. Thierry Billard's biography describes him in its subtitle as a président incompris, or "misunderstood president". The book examines the false stories one by one and presents Deschanel again as an able parliamentary leader, a thinker of a moderate and socially responsible Republic, and president of the Chamber during two difficult periods, from 1898 to 1902 and from 1912 to 1920.

General histories of the Third Republic also explain the political meaning of the presidential election of 1920. By choosing Deschanel instead of Clemenceau, the deputies and senators made a clear decision. They wanted to close the period of war and return to the older idea of a quiet President with limited power.

The crisis of September 1920 showed the weaknesses of this choice. The forced resignation of Millerand in 1924 showed them again. Deschanel stood between two historical periods: the Republic of educated men, social position, and formal speech, and the newer mass democracy.

In the end, his life was unusual and tragic. He gave his whole career to winning an office whose pressure broke him within a few months. Against his wishes, history remembers his fall more clearly than his long rise.

Important dates

Date	Event
13 February 1855	Born in Schaerbeek, Belgium, among French republicans living in exile after the events of 2 December 1851.
1859	His family returns to France.
2 January 1878	Becomes sous-préfet of Dreux. He later works at Melun in 1879, Brest in 1879, and Meaux in 1881.
August 1881	First stands for election to the Chamber at Dreux but loses.
October 1885	Elected deputy for Eure-et-Loir. He is elected nine times in total and remains a deputy until 1920.
9 June 1898	Becomes president of the Chamber of Deputies and remains in the office until 1902.
1899	Elected to the Académie française.
February 1901	Marries Germaine Brice. They later have three children.
1 June 1902	Léon Bourgeois defeats him for the presidency of the Chamber.
January 1913	First serious attempt to become President of the Republic. Raymond Poincaré is elected.
1912–1920	Serves again as president of the Chamber, including throughout the First World War.
17 January 1920	Elected President of the Republic with 734 votes after Georges Clemenceau withdraws following the test vote.
Night of 23–24 May 1920	Falls from the presidential train near Montargis while travelling to Montbrison.
10 September 1920	Walks into a pond at Rambouillet during a period of mental confusion.
21 September 1920	Resigns as President of the Republic.
9 January 1921	Elected to the Senate by Eure-et-Loir.
28 April 1922	Dies in Paris. His funeral takes place on 3 May, and he is buried at Montparnasse Cemetery.

Books used

• Thierry Billard, Paul Deschanel. Le président incompris, Paris, Perrin, Tempus, 2022. The main modern biography, based on Deschanel's private papers. It examines and rejects many false stories.
• Older works discussed in Billard's book include Jean Mélia, Paul Deschanel, Plon, 1924; Louis Sonolet, La Vie et l'Œuvre de Paul Deschanel, Hachette, 1926; and Dr Logre's article on "Elpenor syndrome" in Le Monde, 1 May 1948, the first medical study of the fall from the train.
• Jean-Jacques Becker, Victoire et frustrations (1914–1929), Paris, Le Seuil, Points Histoire, 2013. Used for the election of January 1920 and the Bloc national.
• Jean-Marie Mayeur, Les Débuts de la IIIe République (1871–1898), Paris, Le Seuil, Points Histoire, 2013; Madeleine Rebérioux, La République radicale ? (1899–1914), Paris, Le Seuil, Points Histoire, 2014. Used for the political background of Deschanel's early career.