ROUHER, EUGÈNE. — French politician, born on 30 November 1814 at Riom (Puy-de-Dôme), died on 3 February 1884 in Paris. He began practicing as a lawyer in 1836 and ten years later stood for Parliament for the first time, but was not elected. After the revolution of February 1848 he was a member of the Constituent Assembly.
For the elections of 23 April he had prepared himself with a program which, although it did not conceal the desire to preserve the traditional forms of French society, nevertheless tended toward the implementation of certain reforms favorable to the lower middle class and the workers. R. in fact proposed a radical transformation of the existing tax system, with particular regard to the abolition of indirect taxes and the establishment of a progressive direct tax; among other things, he declared himself in favor of labor legislation and State intervention in the event of public agricultural disasters. This electoral program won him the support of all those who feared
the leap into the unknown represented by a democratic republic. His activity in the Assembly increasingly revealed him to be a man of order, and during the discussion of the draft of the new Constitution he broke with the majority and advocated bicameralism against a single legislative Assembly. Re-elected deputy on 13 May 1849, he became a supporter of Bonaparte, then still President of the Republic, and on 30 October of the same year entered the government as Minister of Justice. He remained a minister, with interruptions, until January 1852. He then became Vice-President of the Council of State, Minister of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works from 1855 to 1863, and Minister of State from 1863 to 1869. President of the Senate from 18 July 1869 to 4 September 1870, he went to London after the defeat at Sedan, in the retinue of the Empress Eugénie. Returning to France, R. was elected deputy to the National Assembly in February 1872 and, after the death of Napoleon III, assumed the effective, though not official, leadership of the Bonapartist party. In 1881 he withdrew into private life.
R. was among Napoleon III’s most faithful collaborators. As Minister of State, from 1863 onward he defended the Emperor’s domestic and foreign policy against parliamentary criticism. Particularly well known is the speech he delivered on 5 December 1867 Mentana (v.). On that occasion, replying to several interpellations, he justified the French intervention against Garibaldi, because it had been undertaken with the intention of enforcing the September Convention. He said that, faced with Rattazzi’s inability to guarantee the Papal States against the intrigues of the revolutionary party, France had felt obliged to send an expeditionary force that would remain in Rome «until the moment when the security of the Pope should make the presence of French troops necessary... We declare that Italy will not take possession of Rome. France will never tolerate such violence done to her honor, done to Catholicism. She will demand from Italy the rigorous and energetic execution of the September Convention; otherwise she herself will ensure it». These words profoundly impressed and excited Italian liberal public opinion, and R.’s firm position on that occasion contributed significantly to the failure of the negotiations for a tripartite Austro-French-Italian alliance in 1870.