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As the preeminent French military power in the 1860s, France under Napoleon III sought to expand its sphere of influence and counter growing German unification.
This ignited tensions with the ascendant Kingdom of Prussia. By summer 1870, diplomatic brinkmanship gave way to outright war as Napoleon III fatefully declared hostilities.
What followed over the next two months was a series of French defeats by the Prussian military machine, culminating at Sedan on September 2nd with the capture of Napoleon III and 100,000 troops, leaving the road to Paris open.
The government of national defense took over and vowed to fight on from Paris. By September 19th, Prussia had encircled Paris, marking the start of a four-month siege.
Paris had hastily mustered 513,000 soldiers and guards but faced a battle of attrition, with Prussian commander Helmuth von Moltke settled on starving Paris into eventual surrender rather than risk losses and outrage from a direct assault.
What followed was over 130 days of privation and suffering for Parisians, as food stocks dwindled, disease spread, and winter temperatures plunged.
With Parisians dying weekly in the thousands, France had little choice but to sue for peace in late January, ending both the iconic siege and the Franco-Prussian War after 16 arduous weeks.
As Prussian forces tightened their noose around Paris in mid-September 1870, the city braced for the anticipated German onslaught.
The regular French garrison in Paris numbered around 60,000 battle-hardened troops under the seasoned commander, General Trochu. But the scale of the German juggernaut assembled outside the city dwarfed this professional core.
In a desperate bid to bolster Paris' defensive ranks, the authorities had scraped together a mixed volunteer force of around 513,000 potential fighters of varying readiness.
The hardened regulars and 90,000 mobile guards drew from military training to steady the makeshift battalions. But fully half this improvised force was composed of 350,000 men of the National Guard.
While driven to defend their capital, few could truly be considered soldiers.
Outfitted in their dark blue, semi-military uniforms, these citizen-soldiers more resembled a ragtag militia than a professional fighting force.
They drilled irregularly, hampered by inadequate weaponry and poor leadership in the ranks.
Though patriotic in spirit, the national guardsmen lacked the training, discipline and steel needed to confront Europe's most lethal fighting force encamped beyond the city walls.
Their mettle would be tested in the grueling four-month ordeal ahead, braving the cold, hunger and disease alongside the regulars.
The heroism of Paris' improvised ranks would be engraved in the city’s lore of resistance. But their initial unreadiness in that fall of 1870 would usher in the long agony of the siege.
After encircling Paris in September 1870, the Prussian high command opted against bombarding the defiant city into immediate submission, overruling its own artillery chief.
Prussian Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck had proposed a merciless bombardment of Paris to force a swift capitulation, rendering all French efforts to relieve the capital futile.
But King William I and General Moltke demurred—they were focused on destroying French field armies still at large rather than pummeling Parisians.
Moreover, Prussian military calculus was sharpened by political considerations.
A devastating bombardment would claim countless civilian lives, violate codes of engagement and turn European opinion strongly against Prussia's bid for continental dominance.
Protracted siege conditions and deprivation would also radicalize the Parisian populace, complicating eventual peace terms. But the aura of Prussian invincibility had to be preserved above all.
So Prussia calibrated its coercion carefully over the next four months, supplementing encirclement with just enough discomfort and difficulty to strangle Parisian resistance.
A limited artillery barrage in January intensified the psychological strain without engendering martyrdom.
This calibrated siege—neither soft enough to allow defiance nor merciless enough to steel resistance—was designed to divide Parisian morale and force the French government's surrender through exhaustion rather than fury.
By January's end, with Parisians dying by the thousands weekly from starvation and disease, Prussia’s unyielding grip around the city had exacted a calculated but devastating toll.
As the vise of the Prussian siege slowly squeezed Paris through late 1870, food supplies dwindled rapidly for the city’s over 2 million inhabitants.
Strict rationing failed to curb profiteering and hoarding as starvation crept through the streets.
With no relief force in sight by November, the situation grew dire.
Horse meat led the menu as the siege forced the sacrifice of remaining livestock.
But with even horses, donkeys and mules consumed over the following weeks, Parisians turned towards the unthinkable—the city’s pets and strays were next into the cooking pots.
Dogs and cats emerged as substitutes for beef and mutton.
When those sources also ran dry by Christmas, culinary taboos surrendered to hunger.
Reports abounded of Parisians driven to capture the city’s prolific rats, risking disease to grill them.
As temperatures plunged and fuel ran short, the besieged population grew more desperate by the day.
Even the beloved elephants ‘Castor’ and ‘Pollux’ in the Jardin des Plantes were reportedly slaughtered in early January to feed the famished guardsmen. No animal in Paris remained safe from the dinner table as the cruel siege dragged into winter.
This collective hunger left lasting scars across the city’s psyche.
Food stores that had once creaked with bounty were hollow and barren. Stunted children arrived at orphanages begging for crusts of bread.
The degrading lengths Parisians underwent in their search for sustenance fueled resentment towards the distant Prussian encirclement.
Hunger fed defiance as much as exhaustion in the city Moltke aimed to tame. By early 1871, Paris stood starved but unbroken before its adversaries.
As autumn gave way to winter outside Paris, life within the city grew bleaker by the day.
Hunger and hypothermia drained the strength of a populace already weakened by four months of deprivation. But an even deadlier menace now stalked the streets—disease that spread rapidly through the densely-packed arrondissements.
With privies overflowing into exhausted wells, typhoid infections mounted across the city by late 1870 as Parisians grew increasingly dependent on the Seine for drinking water.
The river absorbed the bacterial storm drain of a crowded city under siege. Weakened immune systems soon succumbed to outbreaks of dysentery, influenza and spotted fever.
Paris’ understaffed hospitals overflowed with the starving and sick.
Mortality rates exponentially rose through rioting, suicide and malnutrition.
Soon the peal of passing funeral carriages provided the only reliable rhythm of life and death under the Prussian stranglehold. By January 1871, Paris buried over 20,000 bodies each week, with thousands more forgotten souls perishing unrecorded in their quarters.
Through that merciless winter, cold and disease conspired with hunger to hasten the end of French resistance.
Paris persisted in spite of all suffering Prussia could enable short of outright assault.
Moltke’s artillery chief had promised the city could be forced to capitulate “within eight days” —but Prussia had not counted on 101 days of defiance in the face of tendered starvation, bitter cold and rampant disease stalking a population reduced to consuming candles for sustenance.
By late September 1870, Paris stood completely encircled and cut off behind Prussian lines.
With rail and telegraph links severed, the city relied chiefly on hot air balloons to sustain its tenuous contact with the outside world.
Over sixty balloons borne aloft from Paris carried about 2.5 million letters and 10,000 pounds in pigeon messengers that autumn, maintaining precious lines of communication for the beleaguered city.
But on September 23rd, the “Neptune,” a balloon under noted aerial photographer Nadar, inaugurated a new aerial purpose in military history.
Carrying 125 kilograms of vital mail through Prussian airspace to liberate France, the pioneering flight also transported Paris’ first airborne passengers - two badly wounded soldiers.
This aerial evacuation of casualties was soon normalized as a regular “air ambulance” through the siege.
As Prussian encirclement tightened, balloons served as the only conduit for evacuating many of those critically injured among Paris’ defenders.
Over 160 wounded French soldiers were carefully transported skyward in basket slings beneath the balloons, escaping the hellish confines of the surrounded city.
The improvised aerial ambulance provided a vital lifeline for troops otherwise condemned to succumb to injuries without surgical treatment.
While limited in capacity, this novel aerial conveyance offered one ingenious method for overcoming city walls that could not be breached by boots or wheels at a time when traditional battlefield medicine failed the wounded.
Though the 21st century eventually rendered military ballooning obsolete, for four months above beleaguered Paris, these silk globes delivered salvation.
As Prussia tightened its chokehold on Paris that fall, balloons provided the only reliable means for messages to escape the isolated city.
But reaching Paris remained an immense challenge.
While rail and telegraph links were easily severed, Prussian guns proved ineffective against an airborne postal service with an avian twist—Paris’ wartime “pigeon post.”
To restore communication with the outside world, Paris packed camera film carrying hundreds of micro-written dispatches into pouches strapped to carrier pigeons.
These messenger birds were flown out and transported to relay stations beyond Prussia’s lines, where messages were retrieved, copied and forwarded on. For return correspondence headed into beleaguered Paris, the process simply reversed.
Over the next four months, tireless pigeon couriers created an aerial courier system unlike any before seen in warfare.
Of the 57 birds initially air-dropped back into Paris with dispatches, an impressive 95,000 tiny letters arrived for desperate city residents, proving the system’s viability.
By early January 1871, over 60,000 printed dispatches had been flown into Paris via pigeon post.
This one-way pigeon pipeline also allowed a constant stream of news out of the city. Some estimate over 150,000 official and personal letters escaped Paris atop the wings of its 310 hardy messenger pigeons.
While Prussian troops could isolate the city using rails and wires, Paris’ feathered couriers could not be deterred—ensuring a lifeline through messages carried upon the wind.
After four grueling months encircled by Prussian forces, Paris finally concluded armistice negotiations on January 28th, 1871.
That very night, wagons loaded with life-saving provisions began rolling towards the city’s barriers from sympathetic nations across Europe. This vital sustenance would reach the starving populace in mere hours.
The terms of armistice stipulated that food convoys were to be immediately waved through Prussian lines into the stricken capital.
Anxious to restore order, Prussia eased its stranglehold so relief could pacify volatile Parisians. The first humanitarian convoys arrived to ecstatic welcome early on January 29th.
British ships had set sail via the Channel days earlier when Parisian resistance neared its limit, correctly anticipating the blockade’s impending end.
The convoy unloaded mountains of flour, rice, cured ham and coal onto Paris’ docks, restocking markets that had laid bare for weeks.
Further aid including livestock and American grain soon restored plenty where once every alley and pot had been stripped of sustenance.
For Parisians long starved under Prussian encirclement, this relief proved emotionally overwhelming but vital for the city’s survival.
While the armistice ended French defiance, it opened a lifeline that fed the weakened populace.
Moltke sought to break Parisian will—but international relief sustained the beaten capital long enough for refined French anger to explosively reignite mere weeks later.
In the armistice signed on January 28, 1871, the French government bound itself to disarm military units defending Paris and hold elections for a new National Assembly.
But these terms bred resentment and radicalism among the Parisian populace after months enduring privation and shelling under Prussian siege. Many National Guardsmen clung fiercely to their arms even as regular troops complied with decommissioning.
Bitter at national capitulation after their stubborn resistance, the people of Paris bristled under a strained peace that brought former Emperor Louis Napoleon’s forces back into the humiliated capital.
Economic anxiety mixed with wounded pride.
When the new conservative National Assembly appeared ready to rescind progressive gains made under siege, tensions erupted.
On March 18th, 1871, Parisian National Guardsmen refused orders to surrender their armaments at the Montmartre barracks.
Fraternization between Guardsmen and regular soldiers instead sparked a revolutionary occupation of Paris.
Within days, radical socialist leaders proclaimed the foundation of the revolutionary Paris Commune—a nascent worker’s republic that audaciously claimed power over the French capital.
This explosive civic uprising emerged as the radical legacy of the Franco-Prussian war, sparked specifically by nationalist grievance and progressive defiance born from the tribulations of encircled Paris.
For two more bloody months, Communards battled French and Prussian troops before their rebellion was ruthlessly extinguished. But the smoldering humiliation bred in the siege would reverberate through French politics for decades hence.
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