Waldeck-Rousseau, Pierre Marie René (1846–1904)

French conservative politician and lawyer, prime minister of France 1899–1902. During his term of office, the army officer Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly imprisoned on charges of spying, was retried and pardoned (though not fully exonerated until 1906).

Waldeck-Rousseau served in the governments of Léon Gambetta and Jules Ferry before retiring from politics in 1889 to concentrate on legal work, but was brought back to stabilize the country in the midst of the Dreyfus affair. His broad coalition government also passed a law that separated the Church and the State, but when Waldeck-Rousseau realized that this was being used by his colleagues to pursue anti-clerical ends, he resigned.