LOUBET, EMILE FRANcOIS (1838— 1929), 7th presi dent of the French republic, was born on Dec. 3o, 1838, the son of a peasant proprietor at Marsanne (Drome), who was more than once mayor of Marsanne. He was admitted to the Parisian bar in 1862, and began to practice at Montelimar, where he married in 1869 Marie Louis Picard. At the crisis of 1870 he became mayor of Montelimar, and thenceforward was a steady supporter of Gambetta's policy. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1876 by Montelimar he was one of the 363 who in June 1877 passed the vote of want of confidence in the ministry of the duc de Broglie. In the Chamber he occupied himself especially with education, fighting the clerical system established by the Loi Falloux, and working for the establishment of free, obligatory and secular primary instruction. In 188o he became president of the departmental council in Drome. He had entered the Senate as a member of the moderate republican party in 1885, and he became minister of public works in the Tirard ministry (Dec. 1887 to March 1888). In 1892 President Carnot, who was his personal friend, asked him to form a cabinet. Loubet held the portfolio of the interior with the premiership, and had to deal with the anarchist crimes of that year and with the great strike of Carmaux, in which he acted as arbitrator, giving a decision re garded in many quarters as too favourable to the strikers. He was defeated in November on the question of the Panama scandals, but he retained the ministry of the interior in the next cabinet under Alexandre Ribot, though he resigned on its recon struction in January. In 1896 he became president of the Senate,
and in Feb. 1899 president of the republic in succession to Felix Faure by 483 votes as against 279 recorded by Jules Meline.
Loubet was marked out for fierce opposition and bitter insult as the representative of that section of the Republican party which sought the revision of the Dreyfus case. In June Loubet summoned Waldeck-Rousseau to form a cabinet, and at the same time entreated Republicans of all shades of opinion to rally to the defence of the State. By the reports of Loubet and Waldeck Rousseau the Dreyfus affair was settled, when Loubet, acting on the advice of Galliffet, minister of war, remitted the ten years' imprisonment to which Dreyfus was condemned at Rennes. Lou bet's presidency saw an acute stage of the clerical question, the separation of church and state ; serious differences with England at the time of the South African War and the Dreyfus case respectively; and the formation of the Anglo-French entente. President Loubet was a typical example of the peasant-proprietor class, and had none of the aristocratic proclivities of President Faure.
His presidency came to an end in Jan. 1906, when he retired into private life, surviving until December 20, 1929, when he died at Montelimar.