Revolutions - 8.3- The Government of National Defence

Episode Date: May 20, 2018

In September 1870, everyone in Paris prepared for a siege. Some of them also prepared for revolution.  Remember: revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 8.3, the Government of National Defense. So last time, we talked about the further course of German unification in the 1860s, a course which led to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the summer of 1870. Now, most observers of European war and politics sort of took it for granted that the size and strength of France would mean that they would eventually prevail in the conflict. This was certainly Emperor Napoleon III's opinion. But as we saw last week, the Prussians had done a superior job preparing for the war and adapting to the new realities of modern warfare. And the French, the French had not.

So six weeks of French defeats culminated with the Battle of Saddam on September 1, 1870. The French army surrendered. The emperor himself was now a prisoner. But the Battle of Saddam did not mark the end of the Franco-Prussian war, just the first phase of it. Today, we will deal with the reaction to the Emperor's defeat back in Paris, the swift collapse of the Second Empire, and the preparations by the Parisians to defend themselves against the oncoming Germans. Just because the Emperor had been defeated, did not mean that France was defeated. Now, to set the stage for all this, and because Paris will be our home for the next six episodes, I want to start today by taking a closer look at the city of lights as it stood in 1870. First things first, Emperor Napoleon had more or less succeeded in his mission to make Paris the leading city of Europe. By the end of the Second Empire,

Paris was indisputably the European Center of Culture, the Arts, Sciences, Fashion, Architecture, and Literature. During the second half of the 19th century, Paris is where you went to find the leading edge of practically everything. Now, the population of London was bigger. But Paris was also by far the biggest city in continental Europe. In 1870, it was approaching two million people, while the other major capitals like Berlin or Moscow or Vienna still sat in the hundreds of thousands. And that two million was double the roughly one million who had inhabited Paris when Napoleon staged his coup in 1851. So that is a huge explosion of people. Now, a lot of that growth was spurred by the broader urbanization trends of the Industrial Revolution,

But Paris in particular exploded for a couple of unique reasons. First, because of Ostman's need for unskilled laborers to tear everything down and dig everything up as he physically transformed the city. Attracted by plentiful low-skilled jobs, citizens from all over France flock to Paris. But second, as a part of Ostman's reforms, Paris annexed its surrounding suburbs into the city limits, growing Paris from its original 12, arrondissement, to its current 20. That brought in 400,000 new residents right there. So, by 1870, Paris was the largest city in continental Europe, both by physical size and by population, and had grown enormously over the previous generation.

The Osman reforms also had a social impact on who inhabited what parts of the city. As I said in episode 8.1, one of the big goals was to clear out the claustrophobic, unsanitary slums in the center of the city. When those neighborhoods were torn down, wide boulevards, large state buildings, and better residential apartments took their place. This, predictably and purposefully, drove all the poor people living in those slums to the periphery of the city. Every government in France, going back to the French Revolution, had been threatened by the unruly mass. living right on top of the seat of power, and Emperor Napoleon III was determined to eliminate that threat. So central Paris became the Paris of every world traveler's dreams, shops and boulevards, parks, and theaters and cafes, all to stroll through at your leisure. Meanwhile,

the peripheral neighborhoods were jam-packed with poverty-stricken workers, and those did not make it into the brochure. So the population of Paris rose some 50% after 1860 and new. nearly all of it was concentrated in those outer neighborhoods. But thanks to the law of unintended consequences, moving the working poor out of their traditional neighborhoods did not make their political combustibility go away, and it could be argued that it actually made it worse. The Crisscrossing Boulevard's created densely packed quarters where the workers were all right on top of each other day in and day out.

They walked to work together, then they walked home together, then they were crammed right next to each other all the time. And while the traditional home in the San Quilotte and political Parisian uprisings had always come from the east, from the neighborhood of the Fueuag Saint-Antoine, which was the neighborhood of the Jacques and Madame Defarge and her ladies who were always knitting, knitting, knitting, well, now that center of politicized lower-class power was in the north around Montmart and Belleville, areas that were once suburbs and had only recently been annexed into Paris. So what was this ballooning working-class population doing? Well, we know that there was a big industrial liftoff in France during the Second Empire, driven in part by Napoleon's economic

stimulus, and Paris was home to textiles, building construction, food production, and delivery, the furniture trades, jewelry, bakeries, printing, you name it, it's in Paris. The explosion of these trades was driven by rising demand from a growing and prosperous middle class, both in France and abroad, who had disposable income for new consumer goods. So where a lot of traditional Parisian artisans had focused on high-end luxury goods for the super rich, there was now a lot of demand for less exquisite consumer products. But though manufacturing output was exploding, that still does not mean we are talking about the big huge factories that employed thousands of workers in large cubes made of steel,

smoke and suffering. Though a few such factories did pop up, specifically in the east end of the city where there were ironworks and steam engine factories, the workers of Paris were mostly locked into a kind of transitional stage between the old artisans who figured so prominently in 1848 and the later workers of those giant factories of mass production. So less than 10% of Parisian manufacturers employed more than 10 workers. Over 60% employed two or less. less. So working conditions were very decentralized. Now, a part of the transition meant that these manufacturers and their workers rarely took one manufactured item from zero to complete, as the old artisans used to. And most everyone had now figured out the division of labor. And as Adam Smith

had talked about 100 years earlier, a worker could make a hundred times more nails if they made only nails all day long. So the work was drudgery, but mostly confined to smaller home-based shops, which I should point out, made it hard to unionize and get a labor movement going. Now, the wages of these workers in Paris were good compared to other cities in Europe, and more importantly, good compared to the subsistence existence of the French peasant, especially now that cottage industry and supplemental piecework had gone the way of the dinosaur. But these good wages still left most of the workers straddling the poverty line. What few francs a day they made quickly disappeared to pay for rent and food and fuel for their fires and stoves. The rest of it

usually went for wine. And during this period, alcoholism became a rampant scourge that often devoured what little discretionary income a family might have. And sadly, sometimes quite a bit more than that. Everyone was one good layoff or firing or slow down away from disaster. And at any given time, roughly a quarter of the population of Paris was living that disaster, living below the poverty line. With so much of the city living in such deplorable conditions, Napoleon III, who, let's remember, had once written a book called The Abolition of Poverty, did make some efforts to mitigate the misery.

He ordered health clinics open for the sick and wounded workers. He started state insurance policies for orphans and widows, he offered legal aid for the poor, and he promoted subsidized low-income housing as a part of Osman's reforms. Then during the liberalizing period, the mid to late 1860s, the emperor even guaranteed the workers a few rights. Employers, for example, could not hold your workbook hostage, and the workbook was necessary to go get another job. He also granted the right to strike, and then later the right of workers to self-organize. But with most

workers isolated from each other in small shops all day, that was a right easier to enjoy than actually use. But despite the emperor's political liberalization and his social programs, his attitude towards Paris was still that of a man who believed he was camping out in the middle of enemy territory. The emperor knew his base of popular support was not in the city, but out in the rural provinces, where he could always find votes among Marx's sack of potatoes. So in the midst of the liberalization, the leaders of the Second French Empire still deeply feared the threat posed by a politicized and revolutionary Parisian population. This had been a fear of all French governments going back to the Terminorian reaction. So, for example, Paris was still not allowed to be unified

politically. The brief experience of the original Paris commune, created after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, and abolished after the Prairieal revolt of May 1795, had taught all French rulers the dangers of a unified Paris. So there was no mayor of Paris. Each of the 20 arrondissement had their own mayor, and Napoleon and the leaders of the empire had a right to be afraid. In many quarters, the coup of 1851 had never been forgiven, and it seemed like the population was just waiting for their chance to have their revenge. When they were finally given the right to voice their opinion in the last very liberal election of the empire, held in 1869, Paris voted for delegates who straight up opposed the empire to the tune of 65,

to 35%. So the imperative of controlling Paris was a huge concern, and it actually hindered preparations for the Franco-Prussian War. Even as it was obvious that they needed to raise the whole nation to go fight the Prussians, the imperial ministry hesitated to hand out guns to able-bodied workers in Paris, because those able-bodied workers were as likely to attack the Twilery Palace as they were a battalion of Prussian infantry. And they weren't wrong about that. So what I want to do is, now, is transition into a look at some of the specific political and social groups inside Paris who were indeed the emperor's enemies? Groups that even amidst the general liberalizing trends of the late 1860s were still targets for suppression, harassment, fines, arrest,

and exile. All of them were just waiting to pounce. And when word came back to Paris on September the 3rd, 1870 that the emperor had been captured, pounce is what they did. So the most overtly threatening were probably the Blancists, who were dedicated professional revolutionaries. Their leader was Louis August Blanke, who has actually been around for quite a while now. He joined his first Carbonari Lodge way back in 1824 and was an active participant in the Republican conspiracies that were growing to overthrow Charles Xth even before the July Revolution. He was among those who then participated in the Three Glorious Days, and was also among those who felt betrayed by the conservative turn after the Three Glorious Days. An ardent Republican, Blonkey was an active leader in the secret societies that challenged the July monarchy in the 1830s, gaining particular notoriety and influence in the Society of Seasons.

A secret revolutionary society we talked about in episode 7.2. They attempted a coup in 1830. Blonkey's almost single-minded obsession with the revolutionary overthrow of the state got him arrested constantly, and he spent the majority of his life imprisoned by one regime or another. Now, he was out of jail when the 1848 Revolution arrived, and he went right back to work as one of the leaders of the radical left, as they challenged the post-February Revolution provisional government. But Blonky was arrested after leading the Great May demonstration, and so he was in jail when the June insurrection erupted and was crushed, so it's actually kind of good luck for him. He probably would have died on the barricades. He finally escaped from prison in mid-1865 and made his way to exile

in Belgium, which is where he was sitting when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. His allies in Paris told him that their time might finally be at hand, and so he slipped back across the border into Paris in August of 1870. Now by this point, Blanke self-identified as a socialist, and he believed in class warfare and the need for the working class to supplant the bourgeois capitalist class. But he did not believe in mass worker uprisings, like at all. Blanke's ideological route traced back directly to Gracchus Babuf and the conspiracy of equals. Blonky believed that the mass of workers were too uneducated to effectively overthrow the state. So what was required was a small vanguard of fully dedicated and professional revolutionaries

to seize the levers of power. This vanguard would then set up a revolutionary dictatorship that would use the power of the state to remake society. Now, Blonkey really was actively contemptuous of large-scale mobilization and organization efforts, and come 1870, he was proud of the fact, not deterred by the fact, that when he crossed back into France in the summer of 1870, he only had a few hundred adherents in Paris. Quality over quantity was the name of the game? and the game was to overthrow the empire.

Now, in the early days of his career, Blonkey was aiming simply for a vague, Jacobin-style republicanism. But by 1870, his revolutionary dictatorship would overthrow the bourgeois capitals class and center the state around worker rights and total social equality. But honestly, after nearly 50 years of trying and failing to overthrow a government, any government, the overthrow itself was Blanke's central and consuming obsession. What would be done after the revolution was for him, now mostly an afterthought. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Blanke and his hyper-political revolutionaries were the Prudonists,

the followers of the late Pierre-Josef Prudon, often called the father of anarchism. Prudon was among the early thinkers working in the random stew of proto-socialism in the 1830s and 1840s. He made many of the same observations as other socialists about the oppressive exploitation of labor and the tyrannical axis of state-back capitalism, but his solutions were unique, as he rejected state-based socialism and instead advocated stateless socialism, more as he was the first to dub it, anarchism. His most famous work, first published in 1840, was called What is Property? and in it he handed down what has become his most famous maxim, that property is theft. But though that part sticks in everyone's mind, Prudon also said that property is freedom,

property is despotism, and property is impossible, depending on how you looked at it. Now, because he was a man of his era, one of Prudon's main concerns was the dehumanizing shift away from the upward mobility of the artisans, that is, the advancement from apprentice to journeyman to master, which eventually produced for the artisan dignity and comfort. This advancement was now being replaced by the menial wage worker, who would be a menial wage worker now and forever, leading only to permanent degradation and poverty. But unlike Blonke, Pluton did not believe in the violent takeover of the state. He did not think that was the answer. He thought instead that everyone should just ignore the state. If everyone turned their backs on the state and the exploitive capitalist enterprises they supported, then like a god who no longer had anyone to believe in it, the state and the exploitive capitalist enterprises would simply disintegrate from existence.

Now, Prudon did believe in market economics. He just wanted it to be accomplished by way of worker-owned cooperatives and the principles of mutualism, a radically, decentralized mode of voluntary agreements and associations that were without coercion or exploitation. So again, in contrast to Blonqqq, Prudon encouraged large-scale worker organization, and he advised everyone to just stay out of politics entirely. Prudon died in 1865, so he's not going to be around for the commune, but his message was among the first of the socialist or socialist-adjacent ideologies to actually make some real inroads with the actual working classes. And among the working class leaders who will help make the commune, the Prudonists were probably the largest ideological bloc. So besides Blanke's revolutionary vanguard and Prudon's anarchist worker

collectives, a third and more familiar group joins them, the Neo-Jacubans. Now some version of Neo-Jacobin can be found in all of the Parisian insurrections going all the way back to the July Revolution. When we talked about the specter of the French Revolution that hung over Europe, these were the guys who rejected the formula 1789 good, 1792, bad. They explicitly embraced the leaders of the First Republic and the Committee of Public Safety as the true heroes of the French Revolution. Men like Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Maraud were to be admired and emulated, not scorned and discarded. Neo-Jacuban ideology is kind of a vague and mixed bag, but it promoted ardent republicanism, a centralized state, and a fiercely patriotic and nationalistic outlook on the

world. As a young man, Blonkey was in this neo-jacobin tradition, but he moved over to socialism after he learned to look to Gracchusbebuf and the conspiracy of equals rather than Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. This neo-jacobin tradition, has been around going back to the conspiracies against Charles X, and it's that radical republicanism that had been the guiding force of many of the anti-July monarchy revolts. But one thing that remained constant about neo-jacobinism was that it did not find its home among the lower classes, but rather among university students and the educated but struggling young professionals. So lots of lawyers, lots of doctors, lots of journalists. They hated the empire.

They despised the emperor, and they could not wait to declare a new republic. But they were clearly more focused on the political question than the social question. And though they were eager to recreate a kind of Jacobin-Song-Culot alliance, they were not prepared to turn the world upside down, the way that the Blancis and the Poudonists most certainly were. And the final group we need to talk about was the group that was initially ascendant in the wake of the collapse of the Second Empire, which we're going to talk about here directly.

This is the respectable Republican opposition. And there was a very ill-defined border between the neo-jackabins and the respectable Republican opposition, as they drew from the same pool of educated professionals who hated the empire and never forgave Bonaparte for the coup of 1851. What made them respectable was that when the emperor started liberalizing around 1860, some of them actually got elected into the legislative body, and their pamphlets and newspapers were less stridently radical, and so they were tolerated.

For most of the 1860s, there was never more than a handful of sort of state-approved Republican opponents of the regime. But in the election of 1869, which was the freest and most open election in the whole history of the Second Empire, a whole cadre of these guys entered the legislative body, most of them being elected to represent Paris. Now, these guys had made names for themselves as lawyers or journalists attacking the emperor, but because they were as equally opposed to revolutionary socialism,

their attacks could be more easily tolerated. So the answer is yes. The respectable Republican opposition of 1870 was essentially the same as the group of respectable Republicans who had triumphed back in February of 1848. They were political opponents of the existing regime, but they had no interest in overturning the social order. These respectable Republicans became defined by the quote-unquote three Jules, Jules Favre, Jules Féry, and Jules Simone. The first two were lawyers, the latter professor of philosophy, who, as we will see in a moment, will take the first step towards abolishing the empire and founding the Third French Republic.

Now, the guy who straddled the nebulous line between respectable opposition and radical neo-Jacobinism was Leon Gambata. Just 32 years old in 1870, Gambita had come to Paris in the late 1850s to study law, and he became radicalized by the Republican student groups, and he became a powerful and charismatic opponent of the empire. He stood out as one of the best orators of his generation, later earning comparisons to Maribault. Gombata spent the 1860s practicing law in Paris

and was among those who were opposing the emperor, but just inside the bounds of legality. In 1868, Gombata launched himself to the forefront of opposition politics when he took up the defense of the editor and journalist Louis Charles Delacluse, who we're actually going to talk more about next week. De LaCla Cruz wanted to raise funds to build a monument to a deputy who had been killed opposing the coup of 1851. He was, very predictably, hauled up on charges. The end result of the case was that Delacluse was forced

to flee into exile, but Gametat's defense had been a sensation in how brazenly he had attacked both the coup and the emperor. In the election of 1869, he was elected to serve in the legislative body and joined that cadre of Republican opponents of the regime. In this brief stint in the legislative body that lasted until the Declaration of War in the summer of 1870, Gambita was easily the loudest, most charismatic and popular leader of the left opposition. And when the emperor was defeated, he would become the loudest, most charismatic and popular leader of the newly declared Third Republic. Okay, so getting back into the plot, reports started filtering back to Paris late on September 3, 1870, that the French army and the emperor had been captured by the Germans at Sedan.

The legislative body met in an emergency session late that night, and Jules Favre, one of the leaders of the Republican opposition, put forward a motion to use this opportunity to abolish the empire. But obviously, supporters of the empire made up a majority of the legislative body, so they blocked a vote. But the next morning, Sunday, September 4th, 1870, the legislative body reconvened, and this time, events played out almost note for note the way the things played out in February of 1848.

So much so that this was an episode about Roman history, I would be tempted to accuse the author of whatever source I was using, of just lazily using the same narrative structure for two entirely different events. Anyway, what happened is that 20,000 citizens streamed down into the center of Paris on the morning of September the 4th, most of them, coming down from more. Montmart and Belleville. With the help of some friendly members of the National Guard, this crowd burst into the Palais Bourbon and overran the session of the legislative body, driving away those delegates loyal to the empire and cheering the members of the Republican opposition.

Now, the Republican delegates were about to declare a republic right there, but then they remembered that these things were always done at the Hotel de Ville. So a great procession made its way down the street. When this mob arrived at the Hotel de Ville, they found even more than, people gathered, along with leftist leaders and E.o-Jacobin Republicans. The opposition delegates of the legislative body then crammed themselves into the Hotel de Ville, and in the chaos, Leon Gambata emerged at the window and declared to the cheering throng below that the emperor was deposed, the empire was abolished, and the Third Republic was hereby founded. Now, with most of

the existing legislative body still in the bag for the empire, the men who gathered at the Oteldeville had to figure out a way to make sure that nobody else got in their way. So the Parisian delegates splintered off, and they took it upon themselves to draw up and approve a new provisional government. As with the provisional government of 1848, this new self-declared Republican government was dominated by the respectable Republicans, and when the ministerial portfolios were doled out, they all went to men like the three joules. Jules Favre, who tried to declare a republic the night before, was made Minister of Foreign Affairs. Leon Gambatam, meanwhile, managed to snag Minister of the Interior, mostly by racing over to the Interior Ministry and dispatching letters with his name stamped on them,

Minister of the Interior. That's sometimes how things like this get done. But since this was all going on against the backdrop of a war against Prussia and a genuine national emergency, they wanted to maximize patriotic unity and make it clear that this government was going to focus exclusively on national defense. And so they called themselves the government of national defense. Now, since the national defense and other war considerations were to be prioritized, the guys who now made up the government of national defense offered its presidency to the current governor-general of Paris, General Louis Jules Trochou. Trouchou had the support of the regular army, which was good, but he was by political disposition a

conservative Catholic and a constitutional monarchist. He was really like an orally honest. He was not a Republican, and he was not a liberal, and certainly he was not any brand of revolutionary. Under normal circumstances, General T'Hou would be crushing this revolution, not going along with it. But after the Battle of Saddam, the national emergency seemed to take precedence. But even still, T'Hou only accepted the presidency on the condition that the government of defense would swear to uphold God, the family, and property. Now, neither the makeup of the government, nor the appointment of Hoshu, made the leftist leaders of Paris happy. But at least in this initial stage, they went along with the program,

because the government was making it clear that the only thing that mattered right now was carrying on the war with Prussia. That had to be the sole object. The emperor was lost, but France was not. And it was at least gratifying that the rest of the left, legislative body, all those conservative imperial sycophants, were all told to hustle out of Paris and reconvened somewhere else. And they did. They eventually settled in the safety of Bordeaux, where they played no part in the events of the next four months. With all of this accomplished and a new government of national defense in place, furious preparations began to defend Paris. After Sedan, 200,000 French soldiers remained in the city of Metz, but they were besieged and could offer

the capital no relief. General Trotschou called all garrisons from the surrounding area of Paris, including all those who had successfully retreated away from the front lines. But that still only amounted to about 60,000 regular soldiers. He also had about 90,000 members of the Mobile Guard, a homebred reservist force that was not particularly experienced, well-trained, or disciplined, and so the bulk of the defense of Paris would rely on the force that the emperor had done his level best to keep in the bottle for the last 20 years, the National Guard. The Paris National Guard, as has so often been the case here on the Revolution's podcast, would be one of the critical components of the Paris Commune. And as a result, this will be

their last stand, their last hurrah, and not to spoil things too much. But after the Paris Commune, the National Guard will be abolished permanently. So let's talk one last time about the National Guard. Remember, after he successfully pulled off his coup of 1851, one of the first things that Prince President Bonaparte had done was reorganized the National Guard. During the tumult of 1848, the Guard had agreed to place themselves under the command of the Minister of the Interior. The minister would have the sole authority to call them out and direct their actions. Well, with the Constitution of 1852 being so thoroughly autocratic,

that authority to call out and direct the National Guard effectively passed to the Prince President. So, he then ordered the command structure of the Guard to be further centralized, for its officers to be checked for seditious politics, and for its rank and file to be kept nice and upper middle class. So it was important to shed all the dangerous elements like students and artisans and any members of the working class. Then even after all this was done to ensure its political reliability, the National Guard was still almost never called in for serious business during the whole course of the Second Empire. Any sign of domestic unrest was always handled by the regular army. But with the sudden arrival of war in the summer of 1870,

the leaders of the Empire really had no choice but to throw back open the doors and beef up the National Guard. The regular army was needed immediately at the front lines, so somebody had to act as a guard back at home and a last line of defense in case it came to that, and it was now coming to that. So every male citizen, aged 25 to 35, was invited to enroll in the Guard, and they were even provided a small salary for their services. The ranks of the Guard boomed to 350,000, with nearly 75% of the eligible population of Paris joining up. This wartime National Guard that General Truchu inherited in September of 1870 was now bulging with working-class members from the more radical working-class districts in the north and east ends of the city.

In those neighborhoods, a National Guard Company could run as large as 2,000 men, while in the richer neighborhoods of Central Paris, recruitment was harder, and companies numbered in the mere hundreds. Additionally, in these emergency times, the government conceded the traditional arrangement that allowed National Guard companies to elect their own officers, and in those working-class companies, military experience took a back seat to political disposition. And then much to the government's annoyance, the company committees who met to elect those officers, committees that were supposed to disband after the elections were over, continued to sit and meet, creating the skeleton of a

permanent administrative apparatus for the increasingly politicized guard. So the arrival of the Franco-Prussian war turned the National Guard back into a permanent organization of the people under arms. They would soon become one of the key parts of the municipal government during the siege of Paris, and then transfer seamlessly into being one of the key components of the Paris Commune. With basically no French army left in the field, the government of national defense hastily prepared to defend Paris with the roughly 500,000 men at their disposal. When Adolf Thier had been Prime Minister of the July Monarchy back in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he had initiated construction of a new defensive wall about 20 feet tall with nearly 100 bulwarks and 17 fortified gates.

Completed by the mid-1840s, the Tier wall ran a 20-mile circuit around the city and would make any direct assault an excruciatingly painful prospect. Complementing the tier wall was a further ring of 16 newly built or refurbished fortresses that commanded high ground at strategic points around the city, creating a buffer zone around Paris with a circumference of some 40 miles. General Troshu had very little faith in the men he now commanded. They were barely trained and they had no experience. So he planned to rest everything on Paris's strong defenses, and he ordered his men to scramble to further fortify the walls and fortresses and stockpile guns and artillery.

As the military preparations commenced, the government also prepared to withstand a potential siege. They gathered up as many provisions as they could. They brought sheep and cattle inside the walls of the city, and they cleared areas to make hospitals. With the Prussians on the march, many wealthier Parisians departed the city in droves. But this exodus was matched by the fearful scrambling of the population that lived in the greater Sen region who poured into the city, looking to hide from the Prussians behind the safety of the Tier Wall. The government of national defense believed that they had enough food inside Paris to hold out for about 80 days. Hopefully, everything would be settled by then.

And before the German armies arrived, there was one attempt made by the Committee of National Defense to conclude a peace on honorable terms. With the emperor defeated and the empire abolished. The leaders of the government of national defense hoped that Chancellor Bismarck would accept his decisive victory, and like the leaders of the Allies in 1814 and 1815, acknowledged that his enemy had been bonaparte, not the people of France. So, self-proclaimed foreign minister, Juo Favre, traveled out to meet with Bismarck and maybe bring it into all of this. Favre was willing to offer a monetary indemnity and even give up some overseas. these colonial holdings as the price of peace. But he discovered that Bismarck wanted quite a bit more

than that. Riding high on the German victories, and wanting to guarantee the defensibility of the future borders of his envisioned German empire, Bismarck demanded the French seed the departments of Alzoss and most of Lorraine. Favre was incensed, and he famously said that France will not, quote, yield an inch of its territory nor a stone of its fortresses, and that if those were Bismarck's terms, then the war would continue. And when Bismarck's terms got out into the public, the Franco-Prussian war really did transform from a war of dynastic aggrandizement for Emperor Napoleon, into a war of national defense against a foreign invader who was clearly aiming to conquer, punish, and dismember France. With no deal to be made,

Favre returned to Paris. On September the 15th, the first German units arrived at the outskirts of that ring of fortresses around Paris. One German army swung around the city to the north, the other to the south, methodically completing an encirclement that would have to be 50 miles around to complete an unbroken circuit. A line that long stretched the German forces thinner than the German generals would care to admit. But luckily for them, General Colchou made no effort. to stop the envelopment. As he later said, he believed that it would be a useless attempt to try any direct attack. The only way to win would be to force the Germans to launch a direct assault

that would see them blasted by the fortresses and then massacred against the walls. But later critics also allege that Troshue's principal object was making sure the social order would be kept in place no matter what happened, that his enemy at this point was not the Prussians, but revolution. On September the 18th, Versailles was captured, and by September the 20th, the two enveloping German armies linked up at the west end of the city, and the blockade of Paris was complete. Inside the city, the Parisians dug in, with patriotic hope that they would outlast the Germans and win the war. The siege of Paris had begun.