The French President Who Died on the Job

On the afternoon of Thursday, 16 February 1899, the President of the French Republic received a visitor in the Salon Bleu of the Élysée Palace. He had ordered the staff not to interrupt. The visitor was Marguerite Steinheil, a society painter’s wife in her early thirties, with whom the President had been involved for roughly three years.

What happened next is the subject of a hundred years of euphemism. The official cause of death, recorded later that evening, was apoplexie foudroyante — a sudden stroke. The unofficial cause was widely understood from the moment the news traveled, and was confirmed by enough first-hand witnesses to make the matter unambiguous. The President of France died during a sexual act.

He was 58 years old. He had been in office four years and three weeks.

The President nobody had wanted

Félix Faure was a Le Havre leather merchant who had risen through the ranks of the moderate Republicans during the 1880s and 1890s. He was tall, handsome, vain, and married, with two adult daughters. Contemporaries described him as physically commanding, intellectually conventional, and obsessed with the dignity of his office.

He had been elected President in January 1895 not because anyone particularly wanted him but because the leading candidates had blocked each other. The Presidency under the Third Republic was largely ceremonial; the real power lay with the Chamber of Deputies. Faure’s job was to wear sashes, host foreign dignitaries, and not embarrass anyone.

He took the wearing of sashes very seriously. He insisted on full ceremonial protocol for events that had been informal under his predecessors. He brought back the practice of riding to public functions in an open carriage with mounted escort. He was nicknamed, behind his back, le Président Soleil — the Sun President.

On matters of substance he was less impressive. The Dreyfus Affair, which split France through his entire presidency, found him on the side of the army and the official line. He refused to consider a retrial even after the evidence against Captain Dreyfus had been publicly exposed as forgery. Émile Zola’s J’accuse, published in January 1898, was addressed not to the Chamber but to Faure personally.

By February 1899 the Dreyfus question had ground France into political paralysis. Faure was reportedly planning to escalate further — perhaps to dissolve the Chamber, perhaps to govern by decree. His political opponents, including Georges Clemenceau, considered him a serious threat to the Republic.

He had, by his own account to friends, ambitions to be remembered as something other than a ribbon-cutter.

The afternoon

Marguerite Steinheil arrived at the Élysée at approximately 5:30 p.m. She was shown to the Salon Bleu, a small reception room on the ground floor that the President used for private meetings. The exact sequence of the next thirty minutes is contested in detail but consistent in outline: at some point the President suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Steinheil began to scream. Staff broke down the door.

Accounts differ on what they found. The most circulated version, which appears in several memoirs and was current in Paris within twenty-four hours, has Steinheil partly undressed and the President unconscious but in a state that made the situation obvious. A more discreet version, preserved in the official record, has the President merely “indisposed” and the visitor “in distress.”

Faure was carried to a bedroom on the upper floor. A priest was summoned. He died at roughly 10 p.m. without regaining consciousness. Marguerite Steinheil was extracted from the palace by a back entrance and put in a cab home, possibly by Faure’s wife herself, who had been summoned from the family apartments and reportedly handled the crisis with composure that the Republic would remember.

The next morning Paris woke to one of those news stories that everyone immediately understands and no newspaper can quite print. Le Figaro led with the official line: a sudden stroke, the President had been working in his study, the nation was in mourning. The political cartoonists led with something else.

The line that survived him

Within days, the wits of the Chamber had produced what would become the most famous epitaph any French president has ever received. The line is attributed to several people, most often to Clemenceau, who had every reason to want it associated with him:

“Il voulait être César, il ne fut que Pompée.”

He wanted to be Caesar; he was only Pompey. The pun depends on French slang. Pompée is the name of the Roman general Pompey. It is also, in nineteenth-century Parisian argot, a coarse word for the act in which the President had been engaged. The sentence is grammatically about ancient Rome. It is not, actually, about ancient Rome.

A second line, of less certain attribution, made the rounds in the same week: that when the priest arrived and asked the dying man’s valet whether the President still had his senses — a-t-il encore sa connaissance — the valet answered that no, sa connaissance — his lady friend — had left by the back door.

The puns are unkind. They are also the reason most of what the public now knows about Félix Faure has survived. Without them, he would be a footnote in the long list of forgettable Third Republic presidents. With them, he is the answer to a trivia question.

What it changed

A great deal, in fact. Faure had been the last serious obstacle to a retrial in the Dreyfus case. His successor, Émile Loubet, signed the order pardoning Dreyfus within months of taking office. Dreyfus was formally exonerated in 1906. The French army’s grip on the Republic’s politics, which Faure had protected, never recovered.

Marguerite Steinheil married twice more, was tried for the murders of her mother and second husband in 1909 (she was acquitted), and lived until 1954. In her memoirs, published in 1912, she described Faure as “a charming man” and gave the events of February 16 a version that does not survive cross-checking against any other source.

She is buried in England, where she lived under her third married name. Her grave is unremarkable.

Faure is in Père Lachaise. The monument, raised by public subscription, shows him recumbent in full presidential regalia, his sash draped across his chest, a tricolor flag covering his lower body and pooling at his feet. The sculptor, René de Saint-Marceaux, claimed the pose was meant to evoke a fallen statesman.

The pose has been read otherwise ever since.