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Félix Faure
President of the French Republic Co-Prince of Andorra
In office 17 January 1895 – 16 February 1899
Preceded by	Jean Casimir-Perier
Succeeded by	Émile Loubet
Personal details
Born	30 January 1841 Paris, France
Died	16 February 1899(1899-02-16) (aged 58) Paris, France
Nationality	French

Félix François Faure (30 January 1841 – 16 February 1899) was President of France from 1895 until his death.

Biography[link]

Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker. 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.

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

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

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

Death[link]

Faure died suddenly from apoplexy on 16 February 1899, at a critical juncture 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 in fact 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 Mme Steinheil "la pompe funèbre" (wordplay in French: could mean both "undertaker" and "funeral blow-job"). George 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 on a man); Clemenceau, who was also editor of the newspaper l'Aurore, wrote that "upon entering the void, he [Faure] must have felt home".^[1] After his death, some alleged extracts from his private journals, dealing with French policy, were published in the Paris press.

Notes[link]

References[link]

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

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Félix Faure

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Alfred de Musset painted by Charles Landelle

Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay(11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.^[1][2] Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical) from 1836.^[2]

Biography[link]

Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris. His family was upper-class but poor and his father worked in various key government positions, but never gave his son any money. His mother was similarly accomplished, and her role as a society hostess - for example her drawing-room parties, luncheons, and dinners, held in the Musset residence - left a lasting impression on young Alfred.^[2]

Early indications of Musset's boyhood talents were seen by his fondness for acting impromptu mini-plays based upon episodes from old romance stories he had read.^[2] Years later, elder brother Paul de Musset would preserve these, and many other details, for posterity, in a biography on his famous younger brother.^[2]

Alfred de Musset entered the collège Henri-IV at the age of nine, where in 1827 he won the Latin essay prize in the Concours général. With the help of Paul Foucher, Victor Hugo's brother-in-law, he began to attend, at the age of 17, the Cénacle, the literary salon of Charles Nodier at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. After attempts at careers in medicine (which he gave up owing to a distaste for dissections), law,^[1] drawing, English and piano, he became one of the first Romantic writers, with his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1829, Tales of Spain and Italy).^[1] By the time he reached the age of 20, his rising literary fame was already accompanied by a sulphurous reputation fed by his dandy side.

He was the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. During this time he also involved himself in polemics during the Rhine crisis of 1840, caused by the French prime minister Adolphe Thiers, who as Minister of the Interior had been Musset's superior. Thiers had demanded that France should own the left bank of the Rhine (described as France's "natural boundary"), as it had under Napoleon, despite the territory's German population. These demands were rejected by German songs and poems, including Nikolaus Becker's Rheinlied, which contained the verse: "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien, deutschen Rhein ..." (They shall not have it, the free, German Rhine). Musset answered to this with a poem of his own: "Nous l'avons eu, votre Rhin allemand" (We've had it, your German Rhine).

The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand,^[1] which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century,^[1] made into a film, Children of the Century), and from her point of view in her Elle et lui. Musset's Nuits (1835–1837, Nights) trace his emotional upheaval of his love for George Sand, from early despair to final resignation.^[1] He is also believed to be the author of Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess (1833), a lesbian erotic novel, also believed to be modeled on George Sand.^[3]

Tomb of Alfred de Musset in Père Lachaise Cemetery

Musset was dismissed from his post as librarian by the new minister Ledru-Rollin after the revolution of 1848. He was however appointed librarian of the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1853.

Musset received the Légion d'honneur on 24 April 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Académie française in 1852 (after two failures to do so in 1848 and 1850).

Alfred de Musset died in his sleep in Paris on 2 May 1857. The cause was heart failure, the combination of alcoholism and a longstanding aortic insufficiency. One symptom that had been noticed by his brother was a bobbing of the head as a result of the amplification of the pulse; this was later called de Musset's sign.^[4] He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Reception[link]

Rolla by Henri Gervex, 1878

The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was highly critical of Musset's work. Rimbaud wrote in his Letters of a Seer (Lettres du Voyant) that Musset did not accomplish anything because he "closed his eyes" before the visions. (Lettre à Paul Demeny, mai 1871)

Director Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu was inspired by Musset's play, Les Caprices de Marianne.

Henri Gervex's 1878 painting Rolla was based on a poem by de Musset. It was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it depicted a scene from the poem of a naked prostitute after having sex with her client - but the controversy helped Gervex's career.

Music[link]

Georges Bizet composed a piece for Piano and Voice based on the poem by Musset, "A Une Fleur".

Lorenzaccio, which takes place in Medici's Florence, was set to music by the musician Sylvano Bussotti in 1972.

In 2007, Céline Dion recorded a song called "Lettre de George Sand à Alfred de Musset" for her album D'elles.

Works[link]

Poetry[link]

• Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, 1829
• Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil, 1832
• Poésies complètes, 1840
• Poésies nouvelles, 1850
  • Les Nuits (Nuits de mai, d'août, d'octobre, de décembre), 1835–1837
• Œuvres posthumes, 1860

Plays[link]

• La Nuit vénitienne, 1830
  • a failure; from this point until 1847, his plays were published but not performed
• André del Sarto, 1833
• Les Caprices de Marianne, 1833
• Lorenzaccio, 1833
• Fantasio, 1834
• On ne badine pas avec l'amour, 1834
• La Quenouille de Barberine, 1835
• Le Chandelier, 1835
• Il ne faut jurer de rien, 1836
• Un Caprice, 1837
  • first performed in 1847, and a huge success, leading to the performance of other plays
• Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, 1845
• On ne saurait penser à tout, 1849
• Carmosine, 1850
• Bettine, 1851
• L'Âne et le Ruisseau, 1855

Novels[link]

• La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical), 1836.^[2]

• Histoire d'un merle blanc (The White Blackbird), 1842.

Secondary Literature[link]

• Henri Lefebvre, Musset, 1955
• Mimi Pinson

References[link]

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Alfred de Musset

External links[link]

Find more about Alfred de Musset on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource

• Works by Alfred de Musset at Project Gutenberg
• Sand and Musset at the Theater to Paris : "Sand et Musset, les Amants du siècle"
• The New Student's Reference Work/Musset, Alfred de
• (French) 'Lorenzaccio' - at Athena