Born from the defeat of 1870 and the fall of the Second Empire, the Third Republic survived the Commune, monarchist threats and political crises to become a durable parliamentary regime before 1914.
Foundations
4 September 1870; siege of Paris; Commune (1871); Thiers then Mac-Mahon; gradual republican conquest of the institutions (1875–1879).
Opportunist and radical republic
Grévy, Carnot, Faure, Loubet, Fallières, Poincaré: school laws, colonial expansion, Dreyfus Affair, separation of Church and State (1905). See also individual presidential pages.