[citation needed] In 1877 he entered politics, playing a conspicuous part on the committee of legal resistance during the Broglie ministry; in the following year he was returned to the chamber as a moderate republican member for Boulogne, in his native département of Pas-de-Calais.

He had an intimate acquaintance and sympathy with English institutions, and two of his published works – Biographie de Lord Erskine, a speech to the Conférence des avocats (1866), and Etude sur l'acte du 5 avril 1873 pour l'établissement d'une cour suprême de justice en Angleterre (1874) – deal with English law; he also gave a fresh and highly important direction to French policy by the understanding with Russia, which was declared to the world by the visit of the French fleet to Kronstadt in 1891, and which subsequently ripened into a formal treaty of alliance.

[1] The real reason of its fall was the mismanagement of the Second Madagascar expedition, the cost of which in men and money exceeded all expectations, and the alarming social conditions at home, as indicated by the strike at Carmaux.

[1] In 1902, M. Ribot participated in lucrative politics when he acted as the minister of Foreign Affairs and chose to agree to the cancelation of Egyptian debt at the cost of access to resources.

Although he had been most violent in denouncing the anti-clerical policy of the Combes cabinet, he now announced his willingness to recognize a new régime to replace the Concordat of 1801, and gave the government his support in the establishment of the Associations culturelles while he secured some mitigation of the severities attending the separation.

After the formation of the Poincaré Government on 14 January 1912, Ribot took the place of Léon Bourgeois as president of the committee appointed to deal with the Franco-German treaty, the necessity for the ratification of which he demonstrated.

On the fall of the Briand Ministry, President Poincaré again called upon Ribot to form a government, and this time he consented, himself taking the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in addition to the premiership (19 March).

In the statement of his policy made to the Chamber on 21 March he declared this to be "to recover the provinces torn from us in the past, to obtain the reparations and guarantees due to France, and to prepare a durable peace based on respect for the rights and liberty of peoples."

Following the decision to dismiss Interior Minister Louis Malvy, his government resigned office on 2 September, but he accepted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Painlevé cabinet constituted six days later.