Background
He was born at Mézin (Lot-et-Garonne), Nov. 6, 1841.
He was born at Mézin (Lot-et-Garonne), Nov. 6, 1841.
He studied law and practiced at Nérac.
A deputy of Lot-et-Garonne from 1876 to 1880, and a senator for the same region from 1890 to 1906, he had a successful and honorable but not brilliant political career. He was successively minister of the interior (1882-1883), premier for one month (1883), minister of public instruction (1883-1885), minister of justice (1887-1888), minister of public instruction (1889-1890), and minister of justice (1890-1892). He was elected president of the Republic in 1906 as a candidate of the leftist groups. During his term as president, he remained a respected though somewhat ineffective figurehead, while bitter conflicts raged inside France as a result of the application of the law of separation of church and state (voted in 1905), and while friction developed between France and Germany, particularly about the Moroccan question. He was succeeded in 1913 by the strong-minded Raymond Poincaré.