Henri Georges Boulay de la Meurthe was elected to the new office on 20 January 1849, as the preferred choice of President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who had also proposed Count Achille Baraguey d’Hilliers and Alexandre-François Vivien.

He was a devoted and discreet supporter of Bonaparte for the next three years; one biographer wrote that he was “always withdrawing, meddling in nothing, not even in his prerogatives”.

[4] During the Second Empire (1852–1870), two influential figures, the Duke of Morny,[5] an illegitimate half-brother of Napoleon III, and Eugène Rouher,[6] were nicknamed “the Vice Emperor”.

In the 1960s, after the founding years of the Fifth Republic, there were proposals within the right-wing majority to create a vice presidency, some linked to the perspective of turning it into a presidential system.

One was put forward privately by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the president of the National Assembly, to President Charles de Gaulle after he escaped the Petit-Clamart attack in 1962,[7] and there were discussions at the 3rd UNR Conference in November 1963, which, by coincidence, was held in the days after the assassination of John F.