Paris Surrenders: German Empire Rises from French Defeat
The Prussian siege of Paris lasted over four months, from September 1870 to January 1871, reducing the world's most glamorous capital to eating rats, cats, and the animals from the city zoo. An elephant from the Jardin des Plantes was slaughtered and sold at a premium. When the French government finally signed the armistice on January 28, 1871, the terms were devastating: France ceded Alsace and most of Lorraine to the newly proclaimed German Empire, paid an indemnity of five billion gold francs, and suffered the humiliation of Prussian troops marching through Paris. The territorial loss created a wound in French national pride that festered for forty-three years and became a direct cause of World War I. The defeat also destroyed Napoleon III's Second Empire and gave birth to the Third Republic, which would govern France until Hitler's invasion in 1940.
January 28, 1871
155 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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