Jules Ferry

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Monument to Jules Ferry by Gustave Michel, 1910
Jardin des Tuileries (Tuileries Garden)
Quartier Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 1st arrondissement
Paris, July 2009

“Jules François Camille Ferry (5 April 1832 – 17 March 1893) was a French statesman and republican philosopher. He was one of the leaders of the Moderate Republicans and served as Prime Minister of France from 1880 to 1881 and 1883 to 1885. He was a promoter of laicism and colonial expansion. Under the Third Republic, Ferry made primary education free and compulsory through several new laws. However he was forced to resign following the Sino-French War in 1885 due to his unpopularity and failure to achieve total victory. Ferry was born in Saint-Dié, in the Vosges department, to Charles-Édouard Ferry, a lawyer from a family that had established itself in Saint-Dié as bellmakers, and Adélaïde Jamelet. His paternal grandfather, François-Joseph Ferry, was mayor of Saint-Dié through the Consulate and the First Empire. He studied law, and was called to the bar at Paris in 1854, but soon went into politics, contributing to various newspapers, particularly to Le Temps. He attacked the Second French Empire with great violence, directing his opposition especially against Baron Haussmann, prefect of the Seine department. A series of his articles in Le Temps was later republished as The Fantastic Tales of Haussmann (1868).” (Jules Ferry, Wikipedia)