The French journalist, historian, and statesman Louis Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was the most gifted of the literary statesmen who were an important feature of 19th-century French political life.

Born at Marseilles on April 16, 1797, Adolphe Thiers attended the local lycée and studied law at Aix. Though admitted to the bar, he forsook the legal profession to become a journalist. Moving to Paris in 1821, Thiers became a contributor to the Constitutionnel, a Liberal paper, and began the History of the French Revolution (10 vols., 1823-1827; trans., 5 vols., 1895), a sympathetic account which established his reputation as a man of letters. The work suffered from diffuseness, casuistry, bias against those with whom he disagreed, and omission of inconvenient facts, all of which evoked the protest from many participants in the described events that he had treated them and their cause unjustly.

Brilliant but arrogant, energetic but antagonistic, Thiers embarked upon a...