French Third Republic proclaimed

On September 4, 1870, crowds in Paris poured into the legislature and declared that Emperor Napoleon III had fallen. From the Hôtel de Ville, republican politicians including Léon Gambetta proclaimed a republic and set up a Government of National Defense. The emperor had been captured two days earlier at Sedan, along with roughly 100,000 French soldiers, in the first big defeat of the Franco-Prussian War. The republic born that day was meant to be temporary, a wartime emergency, but it ended up lasting 70 years, until 1940.¹³⁴

France had been through a cycle of regimes since the French Revolution of 1789: first republic, empire, restored monarchy, the July Monarchy, the short Second Republic after the revolutions of 1848, and then Napoleon III's Second Empire. Republican ideas, voting traditions and a habit of Paris acting decisively when a government collapsed were all legacies of those upheavals. The empire's military failure removed the last justification for Napoleon III's rule, and the Parisian crowd stepped into the gap.¹

The early years were violent. Paris endured a long Prussian siege, and Gambetta famously left the city by balloon to organize new armies. France signed an armistice in January 1871, lost Alsace and most of Lorraine, and then faced the Paris Commune, a radical uprising crushed in the bloody week of late May 1871. Monarchists won the first elections but split among rival claimants, so a republic became the compromise by default. The constitutional laws of 1875 created a president and two chambers, and republicans gradually took control. The regime survived the Boulanger crisis and the Dreyfus Affair, passed free secular schooling and the 1905 separation of church and state, and led France through World War I before falling to Germany in 1940.¹²