t in France in the nineteenth century, and moved also by
selfish reasons, refused its aid and looked on with indifference. Thiers
made a fruitless quest through Europe for practical aid, bringing home
only meaningless expressions of sympathy.

Unfortunately even a number of people in the provinces, relaxed by the
factitious prosperity of the imperial regime, were too willing to yield
to the invaders. Where resistance was brave it appeared fruitless:
Strassburg capitulated on September 28, after the Germans had burned
its library and bombarded the cathedral. A scratch army on the Loire,
under La Motterouge, was beaten at Artenay (October 10) and had to
evacuate Orleans. On October 18, the Germans captured Chateaudun after
heroic resistance by National Guards and sharpshooters.

Though one of the two great French armies was in captivity and the other
besieged in Metz, the idea of submission never for a moment entered
Gambetta's head. Paris was under the command of Trochu, patriotic and
brave, but military critic rather than leader, discouraged from the
beginning, and unable to take advantage of opportunities. A delegation
of the Government of National Defence had established itself at Tours to
avoid the German besiegers, but two of its members, Cremieux and
Glais-Bizoin, were elderly and weak. Admiral Fourichon was the most
competent. Gambetta escaped from Paris by balloon on October 7, and,
reaching Tours in safety, made himself by his energy and patriotic
inspiration, practically dictator and organizer of resistance to the
invaders.

Leon Gambetta, a young lawyer politician of thirty-two, of
inexhaustible energy and impassioned eloquence, was the son of an
Italian grocer settled at Cahors. With the help of his assistant Charles
de Freycinet, he levied and armed in four months six hundred thousand
men, an average of five thousand a day. Everything was done in haste and
unsatisfactorily,--the army of General Chanzy was equipped with guns of
fifteen different patterns. But Gambetta did the task of a giant, in
spite of another crushing blow to France, the surrender of Metz.

Bazaine had let himself be cooped up in Metz. Instead of being moved by
patriotism, he thought only of his own interests and ambitions. In the
midst of the cataclysm which had fallen on France he aspired to hold the
position of power. The Emperor gone and the Republic destined, Bazaine
thought, to fall, he would be left at the head of the only army.