raised him to comparative affluence. In
January, 1830, he, along with Armand Carrel, Mignet, and other friends,
started the _National_, and in its columns waged relentless war on the
Polignac administration. The ministry met the opposition it had provoked
by the Ordonnances of July. Among the other repressive measures that
were taken was the sending of a commissary of police to the office of
the _National_, interdicting its publication. Its conductors, with
Thiers at their head, defied the ministry, and the result was the
revolution which drove Charles X. into exile.

Thiers now entered on an active career as a politician. He was elected
deputy for the town of Aix, and was appointed secretary-general to the
minister of finance. His first appearance in the Chamber of Deputies
gave no promise of his subsequent distinction. His diminutive person,
his small face, encumbered with a pair of huge spectacles, and his whole
exterior presenting something of the ludicrous, the new deputy, full of
the impassioned eloquence of the revolutionary orators, attempted to
impart the thrilling emotions affected by Mirabeau. The attempt provoked
derision; but soon subsiding into the oratory natural to him--simple,
easy, rapid, anecdotic--he became one of the most formidable of
parliamentary speakers. Almost from the moment of his entrance into
public life he and Guizot stood forth in opposition to each other as the
champions of radicalism and conservatism, respectively. But he was a
stanch monarchist, and for a time a favorite with Louis Philippe. In
1832 he accepted the post of minister of the interior under Soult,
exchanging it subsequently for the ministry of commerce and public
affairs, and that in turn for the foreign office. He was universally
regarded as a stronger man than any of his chiefs during this period;
but his public and private actions alike were always marked by a certain
fussy quarrelsomeness which prevented him from being ever accounted a
statesman of the first rank. The spirited foreign policy, calculated
above all things to precipitate a quarrel between France and Great
Britain, of which for many years he was the chief advocate, is now
allowed to have been a great, and might have been a fatal, mistake. In
1836 he became president of the council, but in August of the same year
he resigned office, and became the leader of the opposition. In 1840 he
was again summoned to office as president of the council and foreign
min