[Footnote 55:  M. Gregoire in his Histoire de France, vol. iv. p. 647, states that 64 balloons left Paris during the siege, 5 were captured and 2 lost in the sea; 363 carrier-pigeons left the city and 57 came in.  For details of the French efforts see Les Responsabilites de la Defense rationale, by H. Genevois; also The People’s War in France, 1870-1871, by Col.  L. Hale (The Pall Mall Military Series, 1904), founded on Hoenig’s Der Volkskrieg an der Loire.]

Leon Gambetta had leaped to the front rank at the Bar in the closing days of 1868 by a passionate outburst against the coup d’etat, uttered, to the astonishment of all, in a small Court of Correctional Police, over a petty case of State prosecution of a small Parisian paper.  Rejecting the ordinary methods of defence, the young barrister flung defiance at Napoleon III. as the author of the coup d’etat and of all the present degradation of France.  The daring of the young barrister, who thus turned the tables on the authorities and impeached the head of the State, made a profound impression; it was redoubled by the Southern intensity of his thought and expression.  Disdaining all forms of rhetoric, he poured forth a torrent of ideas, clothing them in the first words that came to his facile tongue, enforcing them by blows of the fist or the most violent gestures, and yet, again, modulating the roar of passion to the falsetto of satire or the whisper of emotion.  His short, thick-set frame, vibrating with strength, doubled the force of all his utterances.  Nor did they lack the glamour of poetry and romance that might be expected from his Italian ancestry.  He came of a Genoese stock that had for some time settled in the South of France.  Strange fate, that called him now to the front with the aim of repairing the ills wrought to France by another Italian House!  In time of peace his power over men would have raised him to the highest positions had his Bohemian exuberance of thought and speech been tameable.  It was not.  He scorned prudence in moderation at all times, and his behaviour, when the wave of Revolution at last carried him to power, gave point to the taunt of Thiers—­“c’est un fou furieux.”  Such was the man who now brought the quenchless ardour of his patriotism to the task of rousing France.  As far as words and energy could call forth armies, he succeeded; but as he lacked all military knowledge, his blind self-confidence was to cost France dear.

Possibly the new levies of the Republic might at some point have pierced the immense circle of the German lines around Paris (for at first the besieging forces were less numerous than the besieged), had not the assailants been strengthened by the fall of Metz (Oct. 27).  This is not the place to discuss the culpability of Bazaine for the softness shown in the defence.  The voluminous evidence taken at his trial shows that he was very slack in the critical days at the close