On August 6, two days after the defeat at Wissembourg, the battle of Woerth, or Reichshofen, was fought between the German corps d’armee under the Prussian Crown Prince and the corps of MacMahon, which was completely defeated, and only enabled to leave the field of battle in retreat rather than rout, by brilliant charges of cavalry.  The French lost six mitrailleuses, thirty guns, and four thousand unwounded prisoners.  On the same day the German reserves retook Saarbrueck, and put to flight General Frossard’s division.  After these reverses Napoleon III. proposed to retreat on Paris and to cover the capital.  This also was the counsel of MacMahon; but the empress-regent opposed it strongly, considering it a movement that must prove fatal to the dynasty.  She even refused to receive back her son.  And indeed it did not seem unlikely that the good people of Paris, who ten days before had cheered clamorously their beloved emperor, might have tom him in pieces, had he come back to them after such a succession of disasters.

On the 7th of August, the very day after the battle of Worth, while MacMahon was retreating before the victorious army of the Prussian Crown Prince, the Parisians were made victims of an extraordinary deception.  A great battle was reported, in which the Crown Prince had been made prisoner, together with twenty-six thousand of his men.

All Paris turned into the streets to exult over this victory; everyone rushed in the direction of the Bourse, where details of the great victory were said to have been posted.  In every street, from every house, people were summoned to hang out flags and banners.  An excited crowd filled up the Bourse, many men clinging to the railings, all shouting, singing, and embracing each other.  No one for a long time had any clear idea what the rejoicing was about, yet the crowd went on shouting and singing choruses, waving hats, and reiterating the “Marseillaise.”  The carriage of Madame Marie Sasse, the prima donna, who was on her way to a rehearsal at the Grand Opera House, was stopped, and she was requested to sing the “Marseillaise.”  She stood up on the seat of her carriage and complied at once.  “There was profound silence,” wrote a gentleman who was in the crowd, “when she gave the first notes of the ‘Marseillaise;’ but all Paris seemed to take up the chorus after each stanza.  There was uproarious applause.  The last verse was even more moving than when Faure had sung it, on account of the novelty of the surroundings and the spontaneous feeling of the people.  There were real tears in the singer’s eyes, and her voice trembled with genuine emotion as she came to the thrilling appeal to Liberte.”

At the same moment Capoul also was singing the “Marseillaise” in another street, and in the Rue Richelieu the mob, having stopped a beer cart and borrowed some glasses from a restaurant, were drinking healths to the army and the emperor.