This decree affected eighty thousand persons in France, nearly all of whom were connected by family ties or business relations with the country of their adoption.  The outcry raised by the English and German Press about this summary expulsion procured some modification of the order,—­not, however, without a protest from the radicals, who clamored for the rigor of the law.  Mr. Washburne, the American minister, the only foreign ambassador who remained in Paris during the siege, had accepted the charge of these unhappy Germans, and heart-breaking scenes took place daily at the American Legation.

Soon after the defeats in the first week in August, Mr. Washburne had his last interview with the Empress Eugenie.

“She had evidently,” he says, “passed a sleepless and agitated night, and was in great distress of mind.  She at once began to speak of the terrible news she had received, and the effect it would have on the French people.  I suggested to her that the news might not be quite so bad as was reported (alas! it was far worse), and that the consequences might in the end be far better than present circumstances indicated.  I spoke to her about the first battle of Bull Run, and the defeat that the Union army had there suffered, which had only stimulated the country to greater exertions.  She replied:  ’I only wish the French in these respects were like you Americans; but I am afraid they will get too much discouraged, and give up too soon.’"[1]

[Footnote 1:  Recollections of a Minister to France.]

All this time the “Figaro” was publishing articles that held out hopes of victory and flattered the self-confidence of the Parisians.  Marshals MacMahon and Bazaine were represented as leading the enemy craftily into a snare, and the illusion was kept up that the Germans would be cut to pieces by the peasantry “before they could lay their sacrilegious hands,” said Victor Hugo, “upon the Mecca of civilization.”  Instead of this, the Crown Prince’s army was marching in pursuit of MacMahon’s forces through the great plains of Champagne.  MacMahon had some design of turning back, uniting with another army corps, and attacking the Prussians in the rear, thus hemming in part of their army between himself and the troops of Bazaine in Metz; but he seems to have been really in the position of a pawn driven about a chess-board by an experienced player.

Continually retreating, the emperor, who was with MacMahon’s army, at last found himself at Sedan, safe, as he hoped, for a brief breathing space, from the attacks of the two Prussian army corps which were following in his rear.  He had been warned repeatedly that he must not return to Paris without a victory.  “The language of reason,” he remarked, “is no longer understood at the capital.”

On Aug. 30, 1870, the retreating French were concentrated, or rather massed, under the walls of Sedan,[1] in a valley commonly called the Sink of Givonne.  The army consisted of twenty-nine brigades, fifteen divisions, and four corps d’armee, numbering ninety thousand men.