Wikipedia reports:
“In 1917, a chimpanzee escaped from a nearby ménagerie, entered the palace and was said to have tried to haul the wife of President Raymond Poincaré into a tree only to be foiled by Élysée guards. President Paul Deschanel, who resigned in 1920 because of mental illness, was said to have been so impressed by the chimpanzee's feat that, to the alarm of his guests, he took to jumping into trees during state receptions.”
This seems like a wild story which I feel like I would have heard about. Is it true?
According to Deschanel biographer Thierry Billard, most of the wild stories about Deschanel's "madness" come from a popular book written in 1939, Les secrets de l'Élysée, by Paul Allard (Billard, 1991).
Deschanel did have mental issues and he was painfully aware of them when he was elected president in February 1920. He probably suffered from exhaustion, burnout, and from some undiagnosed depression. Rumours about his mental state were already floating around when he became president. Then, on 23-24 May, he fell from a train wearing only his pyjamas, an incident that made headlines and caused much hilarity. On the early morning of 10 September, as he was staying at the Chateau de Rambouillet, a disoriented Deschanel entered a pond half-dressed and had to be taken back to his room. Deschanel resigned ten days later. He died in April 1922.
The book of Paul Allard compiled - or perhaps invented - rumoured stories about Deschanel during his brief presidency:
The President was mad. At Rambouillet, he threw himself into the ponds, thinking he was a pike. At the Élysée Palace, he climbed trees. He was sometimes affected by micromania, making himself small, humble, low, sometimes by megalomania, believing himself to be king or emperor. All of a sudden, the poor madman had the fantasy of signing his Napoleon decrees. It was his wife who first noticed. When he signed (because he had to keep on signing), she took his hand and guided it. She imitated his signature perfectly. Some decrees were signed by her. The Bureau du Sceau keeps as a curiosity a decree signed "Napoleon" by Deschanel, and another decree signed "Deschanel" by the First Lady replacing her husband.
For Billard, those stories, except the (exaggerated) pond one, are false and not supported by primary sources. There is no reason to believe that Deschanel climbed trees, let alone that he was inspired to do that by the Poincaré incident. This has not prevented later authors from using and embellishing these stories for entertainment in popular history books, cementing the legacy of Deschanel as "the crazy president who climbed trees and fell from trains", just like Félix Faure is for all eternity "the president killed by a blow job". Falling from a train was certainly the most notable thing Deschanel did during his presidency, but he had had a long political career before that.
The story of the escaped ape is also found in Allard's book (and in a previous one he wrote about censorship during WW1) and it goes like this:
One day, a large chimpanzee escaped from a nearby menagerie, climbed the walls, and, throwing itself around the neck of Mme Poincaré who was walking in the park, showed her a truly excessive and outrageous tenderness. The newspapers were energetically asked to keep quiet about this incident which, moreover, they were unaware of.
There are multiple variants of this anecdote, featuring a chimp or an orangutan, escaped from a private home or from a menagerie, and who may have tried to assault - sexually of course - the French First Lady, unless the ape just walked around in the park of the Elysée. Those variants have been repeated in books of anecdotes about French presidents for decades, and of course they're now on the internet.
A final note on Allard: he was a well-known muckraking journalist during the interwar, specialized in books exposing "secrets" about politicians, spies, the French army, tax evasion etc., and he thought himself an historian (note: many sources - including the French National Library... - identify him as Giulio Ceretti, an Italian communist exiled in France in the 1920-1930s, who used Paul Allard as a pseudonym, but Cerutti is definitely not the Paul Allard who wrote about secret French politics).
Paul Allard was not a man of the highest journalistic ethics. A moderate left-winger in the 1930s, he became a hardcore collaborationist during WW2 and died in prison in 1945 (Lastécouères, 2019). His prewar tales about French politics, including presidents like Paul "Crazy" Deschanel or Poincaré and his ape-magnet of a wife, did participate in a general view of the Third Republic being weak, useless and corrupted, something that was weaponized by Vichy during the collaboration. Of course, there may have been an incident about an escaped ape set loose in the Elysée Palace in 1917, but the source is not the most reliable.
Edit: I FOUND THE MONKEY
After some additional digging, I found the original anecdote, originally published in the political and satirical newspaper Le Cri de Paris dated 9 July 1916. It was reprinted in other newspapers in the following days as an amusing item with embellishments. Here is the ur-story:
On Monday evening, after his dinner, the President of the Republic was taking his customary walk in the garden of the Elysée with Mme Poincaré, when he was called back to his office by the arrival of some dispatches. No sooner had he left than a strange, terrible, hairy being appeared before the frightened eyes of Mme Poincaré and rushed at her. At the screams of the victim, the President ran up and the assailant fled to a tree where it climbed with the greatest of ease. The question was raised as to where this dangerous visitor had come from and how it had managed to get into the palace, when Dr Henri de Rothschild came up panting and explained what had happened.
The doctor had brought back from one of his distant journeys a large monkey of a rare species. As the animal is very vicious, it is kept in chains. He was entrusted to the care of a Hindu, who gave it food and who alone was able to win its sympathy.
On Monday evening, the monkey broke its chain, escaped from its cage, and, from garden to garden, fled to the Elysée where it temporarily established its residence. The Hindu followed in his master's footsteps, tried to find his pupil and bring him back to a better state of mind. But the monkey was anxious to take advantage of the freedom it had gained.
It was only after having deployed all the resources of astute diplomacy that the Hindu was able to seize it on a nearby property and decide it to surrender.
This story is a little bit more credible than the version later popularized by Allard. At least the animal is not trying to have its way with Mrs Poincaré. Also, it does not seem that the story was censored. Baron Henri de Rothschild, a playwright-physician-philanthropist-entrepreneur-hunter-automobile racer celebrity, actually lived next to the Palace (at 33 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré), and it's possible for a monkey to make a beeline to the Elysée. The French language does not distinguish apes from monkeys, but since the article describes it as a "rare" species of singe, we can speculate that it was not a well-known ape such as a chimp, an orangutan or a gorilla, but a monkey.
Now, the Baron running to the Palace to find his pet monkey streches credulity a little bit, though one can imagine that the President knew about Rothschild's monkey - all these people ran in the same circles - and called him.
In any case, the Cri du Peuple was a satirical newspaper - several stories following this one are obvious jokes - so it did not hold itself to a high standard of truthfulness. For all we know, Rothschild actually lost his pet and had his manservant call the neighbours, until an Elysée employee found the terrified monkey hiding in a bush. Add a screaming First Lady, a brave wartime President rushing to protect her, and then you get a story worth printing.
Sources