Charles Chesnelong

Pierre Charles Chesnelong (24 April 1820 – 22 July 1899) was a French politician, born at Orthez in the département of the Basses-Pyrénées.

In 1848, during the French uprising, he proclaimed himself a Republican; but, after the establishment of the Second Empire, he changed his views, and in 1865 was returned to the Chamber of Deputies as the official candidate for his native place.

During and after the Franco-Prussian War, for which he voted, he retired for a while into private life; but in 1872 he was again elected deputy, this time as a Legitimist, and took his seat among the conservative Right of the French Third Republic.

[1] He was the soul of the reactionary opposition that led to the fall of Adolphe Thiers; in 1873, it was he who, with Lucien Brun, carried the proposals of the Chambers to the Bourbon claimant Comte de Chambord.

On November 24, however, he was elected to a seat in the French Senate, where he continued his vigorous polemic against the progressive attempts of the republican government to secularize the educational system of France until his death in 1894.