Arthur Ranc (20 December 1831 – 10 August 1908) was a French Radical Senator from Seine from 1891 to 1900 and from Corsica from 1903 to 1908.
Biography[]
Arthur Ranc was born in Poitiers, France on 20 December 1831, and he studied law in Paris before taking part in the 1851 insurrection against Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's dictatorial regime. He spent a year in prison for his membership in a secret society, and he was deported to Algeria in 1854. He escaped to Italy and then to Switzerland, and he returned to Paris following the amnesty of 1859 and contributed to a republican newspaper. Ranc was fined and imprisoned several times for his dissident activities, and, following the proclamation of the French Third Republic in 1870, Ranc became Mayor of the 9th arrondissement of Paris, joined Leon Gambetta in escaping the Siege of Paris on a balloon during the Franco-Prussian War, and served as a deputy to the National Assembly from 8 February to 2 March 1871, when he resigned to protest France's peace talks with the German Empire. He also resigned from the Paris city council during the Paris Commune Revolt. Ranc later re-entered politics with his friend Georges Clemenceau, and he was forced to flee to Belgium in 1871 after right-wingers attacked him for trying to reconcile Adolphe Thiers' government with the Communards. The War Council sentenced Ranc to death in absentia in October 1873, and he returned to France after the amnesty of 1880 and became a deputy of the left for Seine in 1881. In 1888, he joined Clemenceau and other Radicals in opposing Georges Ernest Boulanger's far-right movement, and he was elected a Senator in 1891 and cofounded the Democratic Left parliamentary group in 1892. He later served as a senator for Corsica and as a newspaper editor, and he died in 1908 at the age of 76.