French Third Republic 1870 - 1940

The French Third Republic (in French, La Troisième République, sometimes written as La IIIe République) (1870-10 July 1940) was the political regime of France between theSecond French Empire and the Vichy Regime. It was a republican parliamentary democracy that was created on 4 September 1870 following the collapse ofthe Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War. It survived until the invasion of France by the German Third Reich in 1940.Adolphe Thiers recognized as "le Libérateur du Territoire", and who rallied himself to the Republic in the 1870s, called republicanism in the 1870s "the form of government that divides France least."France might have agreed about being a republic, but it never fully agreed with the Third Republic. France's longest lasting régime since before the 1789 French Revolution, the Third Republic wasconsigned to the history books, as unloved at the end as it had been when first created seventy years earlier. But its longevity showed that it was capable of weathering many a storm.