Adolphe Thiers publishes the first two volumes of his celebrated Histoire de la Révolution française in 1823. which founds his literary reputation and boosts his political career.
Having trained for the law, the twenty-four-year-old Thiers had moved to Paris two years earlier with just a hundred francs in his pocket.
Thanks to his letters of recommendation, he had been able to get a position as a secretary to the prominent philanthropist and social reformer, the Duke of La Rochefoucalt-Liancourt; the man who in 1789, when King Louis XVI, asked if there was a revolt in Paris, replied, "No, Majesty, this is a Revolution."
He stayed only three months with the Duke, whose political views were more conservative than his own, and with whom he could see no rapid avenue for advancement.
He was then introduced to Charles-Guillaume Étienne, the editor of the Le Constitutionnel, the most influential political and literary journal in Paris.
The newspaper is the leading opposition journal against the royalist government; it has forty-four thousand subscribers, compared with just twelve thousand eight hundred subscribers for the royalist, or legitimist, press.
He had offered Etienne an essay on the political figure François Guizot, Thiers' future rival, which was original, polemical and aggressive, and caused a stir in Paris literary and political circles.
Etienne commissioned Thiers as a regular contributor.
At the same time that Thiers began writing, his friend from the law school in Aix, Mignet, had been hired as a writer for another leading opposition journal, the Courier Français, then worked for a major Paris book publisher.
Within four months of his arrival in Paris, Thiers was one of the most read-journalists in the city.
He writes about politics, art, literature, and history.
His literary reputation introduces him into the most influential literary and political salons in Paris.
He meets Stendhal, the Prussian geographer Alexander Von Humboldt, the famed banker Jacques Laffitte, the author and historian Prosper Mérimée, the painter François Gérard; he is the first journalist to write a glowing review for a young new painter, Eugene Delacroix.
When a revolution breaks out in Spain in 1822, he travels as far as the Pyrenees to write about it.
He soon collects and published a volume of his articles, the first on the salon of 1822, the second on his trip to the Pyrenees.
He is very well paid by Johann Friedrich Cotta, the part-proprietor of the Constitutionnel.
Most important for his future career, he has been introduced to Talleyrand, the former foreign minister of Napoleon, who has become his political guide and mentor.
Under the tutelage of Talleyrand, Thiers becomes an active member of the circle of opponents of the Bourbon regime, which include the financier Lafitte and the Marquis de Lafayette.
