Émile Loubet

Émile Loubet (born Dec. 31, 1838, Marsanne, Fr.—died Dec. 20, 1929, Montélimar) was a statesman and the seventh president of the French Third Republic, who contributed to the break between the French government and the Vatican (1905) and to improved relations with Great Britain.

A lawyer, Loubet entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1876, championing the republican cause and working especially for free, obligatory, and secular primary education. He entered the Senate in 1885 and from December 1887 to March 1888 was minister of public works. His tenure as premier and minister of the interior, beginning in February 1892, ended in November as a result of the financial scandal following the collapse of the French Panama canal company, the Campagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, though for a short time he continued to serve as minister of the interior under his successor.

In 1899 Loubet became president of the republic. Known to favour settlement of the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer whose conviction for treason on questionable evidence in 1894 had divided French society, he summoned René Waldeck-Rousseau to form a ministry to resolve the Dreyfus affair and appealed to all republicans to rally behind it. Dreyfus, brought back from the penal colony of Devil’s Island (off the coast of South America), was again convicted by a court-martial; but Loubet, by remitting the sentence and canceling the order for deportation, signaled the victory of republican forces against those of the royalists, the Roman Catholic clergy, and the army.

Loubet’s presidency also marked the complete separation between the French state and the church. In 1905, amid violent controversy, any relationship of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as that of the Protestant and Jewish faiths, to the state was dissolved.

Active also in foreign relations, Loubet visited foreign leaders, including Nicholas II of Russia, Edward VII of Great Britain, and Victor Emmanuel III of Italy—a visit that infuriated Pope Pius X. Loubet smoothed relations with England in April 1904 by signing the Anglo-French entente (Entente Cordiale), which settled their colonial differences.