THE EMPEROR A CAPTIVE; FRANCE A REPUBLIC
The locking up of Bazaine in Metz and the capture of MacMahon’s army at Sedan were events fatal to France. The struggle continued for months, but it was a fight against hope. The subsequent events of the war consisted of a double siege, that of Metz and that of Paris, with various minor sieges, and a desperate but hopeless effort of France in the field. As for the empire of Napoleon III, it was at an end. The tidings of the terrible catastrophe at Sedan filled the people with a fury that soon became revolutionary. While Jules Favre, the republican deputy, was offering a motion in the Assembly that the emperor had forfeited the crown, and that a provisional government should be established, the people were thronging the streets of Paris with cries of “Deposition! Republic!” On the 4th of September the Assembly had its final meeting. Two of its prominent members, Jules Favre and Gambetta, sustained the motion for deposition of the emperor, and it was carried after a stormy session. They then made their way to the senate-chamber, where, before a thronging audience, they proclaimed a republic and named a government for the national defense. At its head was General Trochu, military commandant at Paris. Favre was made minister of foreign affairs; Gambetta, minister of the interior; and other prominent members of te Assembly filled the remaining cabinet posts. The legislature was dissolved, the Palais de Bourbon was closed, and the Empress Eugenie quitted the Tuileries and made her escape with a few attendants to Belgium, whence she sought a refuge in England. Prince Louis Napoleon made his way to Italy, and the swarm of courtiers scattered in all directions; some faithful followers of the deposed monarch seeking the castle of Wilhelmshohe, where the unhappy Louis Napoleon occupied as a prison the same beautiful palace and park in which his uncle Jerome Bonaparte had once passed six years in a life of pleasure. The second French Empire was at an end; the third French Republic had begun—one that had to pass through many changes and escape many dangers before it would be firmly established.
“Not a foot’s breadth of our country nor a stone of our fortresses shall be surrendered,” was Jules Favre’s defiant proclamation to the invaders, and the remainder of the soldiers in the field were collected in Paris, and strengthened with all available reinforcements. Every person capable of bearing arms was enrolled in the national army, which soon numbered 400,000 men. There was need of haste, for the victors at Sedan were already marching upon the capital, inspired with high hopes from their previous astonishing success. They knew that Paris was strongly fortified, being encircled by powerful lines of defense, but they trusted that hunger would soon bring its garrison to terms. The same result was looked for at Metz, and at Strasbourg, which was also besieged.
Thus began at three main points and several minor ones a military siege the difficulties, dangers, and hardships of which surpassed even those of the winter campaign in the Crimea. Exposed at the fore-posts to the enemy’s balls, chained to arduous labor in the trenches and redoubts, and suffering from the effects of bad weather, and insufficient food and clothing, the German soldiers were compelled to undergo great privations and sufferings before the fortifications; while many fell in the frequent skirmishes and sallies, many succumbed to typhus and epidemic disease.
No less painful and distressing was the condition of the besieged. While the garrison soldiers on guard were constantly compelled to face death in nocturnal sallies, or led a pitiable existence in damp huts, having inevitable surrender constantly before their eyes, and disarmament and imprisonment as the reward of all their struggles and exertions, the citizens in the towns, the women and children, were in constant danger of being shivered to atoms by the fearful shells, or of being buried under falling walls and roofs; and the poorer part of the population saw with dismay the gradual diminution of the necessaries of life, and were often compelled to pacify their hunger with the flesh of horses, and disgusting and unwholesome food.