Unlike regimes born in moments of triumphant revolution or carefully planned constitutional conventions, the French Third Republic—which went on to become the longest-lasting system of government in France since 1789—was proclaimed on the afternoon of September fourth, 1870, in an atmosphere of military catastrophe, national humiliation, and panicked improvisation on the streets of Paris. Born directly out of the smoking ruins of Emperor Napoleon III’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the newborn republic had to fight for its survival against both an invading German army at the city gates and a conservative parliament that initially intended to restore a king.
The Trap of the Franco-Prussian War
In the summer of 1870, Emperor Napoleon III’s Second French Empire had been in power for nearly two decades. Although the regime had recently introduced liberal parliamentary reforms and won a resounding public plebiscite in May 1870, the aging, chronically ill emperor—suffering from painful bladder stones—faced mounting anxiety over the rapid rise of Prussia under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Seeking a diplomatic cause that would unite the southern German states with northern Prussia, Bismarck famously edited the Ems Dispatch in July 1870 to make it appear that King Wilhelm I of Prussia had insulted the French ambassador over the question of the Spanish throne.
Outraged French crowds and aggressive ministers in Paris took the bait, declaring war on Prussia on July nineteenth, 1870, confident that the professional French army would march swiftly to Berlin. Instead, the war immediately exposed the disorganized mobilization and outdated command structure of the Imperial army. Equipped with superior steel breech-loading Krupp artillery and moving hundreds of thousands of troops rapidly via coordinated railway networks, Prussian and allied German forces led by Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke crossed the French border, defeated Marshal Achille Bazaine in Eastern France, and trapped Bazaine’s primary army of one hundred and eighty thousand men inside the fortress of Metz.
The Disaster of Sedan on September 2, 1870
Prevented by Empress Eugenie and his cabinet from returning to Paris without a victory for fear that an admission of defeat would trigger a revolution in the capital, the ailing Napoleon III accompanied Marshal Patrice de MacMahon and the newly formed Army of Chalons on a desperate march northeast to relieve Bazaine at Metz. Watching the slow French column through cavalry scouts, Moltke wheeled his German armies northward and pinned the French against the Belgian border in a low valley bowl surrounding the fortress town of Sedan.
On September first, 1870, over five hundred German cannons positioned on the surrounding hills rained shells down into the French pocket. After MacMahon was wounded and desperate French cavalry charges failed to break the iron ring, Napoleon III ordered the white flag raised over the citadel of Sedan to stop the slaughter of his trapped soldiers. On September second, Napoleon III personally surrendered his sword to King Wilhelm I of Prussia, and over one hundred thousand French soldiers marched into captivity. In a single afternoon, France had lost both its primary field army and its head of state.
September 4, 1870: The Bloodless Revolution in Paris
When telegrams confirming the surrender at Sedan reached Paris on the evening of September third, shock instantly turned to fury across the working-class neighborhoods of the capital. On the afternoon of Sunday, September fourth, 1870, as the Imperial Legislative Body (Corps Legislatif) gathered inside the Palais Bourbon to debate creating an emergency regency council, tens of thousands of unarmed Parisian citizens, National Guardsmen, and workers surged across the Place de la Concorde and broke into the parliament chamber shouting for the abolition of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic.
Fearing that radical revolutionary socialists like Auguste Blanqui might seize control of the street crowds and spark a bloody civil war while Prussian armies were marching directly toward Paris, moderate republican deputies led by the fiery thirty-two-year-old lawyer Leon Gambetta and Jules Favre took decisive action. Gambetta declared from the rostrum that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and his dynasty had forever ceased to reign over France, and then led the surging crowd eastward along the Seine to the Hotel de Ville (City Hall)—the traditional site where all French republics had been born. Standing at a window of the Hotel de Ville to the roar of the crowd below, Gambetta and Favre proclaimed the French Republic and immediately formed an emergency Government of National Defense headed by the military governor of Paris, General Louis-Jules Trochu, while Empress Eugenie slipped quietly out of the Tuileries Palace through the Louvre galleries in a hired cab and fled to England.
Siege, the Paris Commune, and the Accidental Survival of the Republic
The context surrounding the birth of the Third Republic remained perilous for the next five years. Just fifteen days after the republic was proclaimed, Prussian armies completely encircled Paris, initiating a freezing four-month siege during which Gambetta escaped the capital in a hot-air balloon to organize new armies in the provinces. When starvation finally forced Paris to capitulate in January 1871 and elections were held in February to ratify the peace treaty ceding Alsace and Lorraine to the newly proclaimed German Empire, exhausted rural French voters elected a National Assembly filled with a huge majority of royalists who wanted peace immediately, while republican Paris wanted to fight on.
After the government of Adolphe Thiers crushed the radical two-month uprising of the Paris Commune in May 1871, the royalist majority in the National Assembly fully expected to abolish the Third Republic and crown the Bourbon claimant, Henri, Count of Chambord, as King Henry V. Yet in a twist of historical irony, the stubborn Count of Chambord refused to accept the crown unless France abandoned the beloved blue, white, and red tricolor flag of the Revolution and returned to the white royal flag with gold fleurs-de-lis. Paralyzed by this flag dispute between competing royalist factions, the deputies passed the Wallon Amendment in January 1875 by a margin of just one single vote (353 to 352), officially establishing the presidency of the Republic and cementing the accidental regime that would govern France for the next seventy years until 1940.
