Defence was formed, he
quitted the capital, before the arrival of the Prussians, to go
from court to court,--to London, St. Petersburg, Vienna,--to implore
the intervention of diplomacy, and to prove how essential to the
balance of power in Europe was the preservation of France. His
feeling was that France ought promptly to have made peace after
Sedan, that her cause then was hopeless for the moment, and that by
making the best terms she could, and by husbanding her resources,
she might rise in her might at a future day. These views were not
in the least shared by Gambetta, who believed--as, indeed, most
Frenchmen and most foreigners believed in 1870--that a general
uprising in France would be sufficient to crush the Prussians.
Thiers knew better; his policy was to save France for herself and
from herself at the same time.

[Illustration: _LEON GAMBETTA._]

We already know the story. Gambetta escaped from Paris in a balloon,
and joined Cremieux and Garnier-Pages, the other two members of
the Committee of Defence who were outside of Paris. At Tours they
had set up a sort of government, and there, in virtue of being
the War Minister of the Committee of Defence, Gambetta proceeded
to take all power into his own hands, and to become dictator of
masterless France. It was like a shipwreck in which, captain and
officers being disabled, the command falls to the most able seaman.
Gambetta had no legal right to govern France, but he governed it
by right divine, as the only man who could govern it.

This is how a newspaper writer speaks--and justly--of Gambetta's
government:--

"From the moment when he dropped, tired out with his journey by
balloon, into his chair in the archiepiscopal palace at Tours,
and announced that he was invested with full powers to defend the
country, no one throughout France seriously disputed his authority.
His colleagues became his clerks. The treasury was empty, but he
re-filled it. The arsenal was half empty, but in six weeks one
great army, and almost two, were supplied with artillery, horses,
gunners, and breech-loaders. The Lyons Reds had been told that
they were wicked fools, and Communists and Anarchists ripe for
revolt in Toulouse, Lyons, and Marseilles had been put down. The
respectables everywhere rose at his summons, anarchy and military
disobedience quailed."

The fortunes of war forced Gambetta and his Government from the
banks of the Loire to Bordeaux. There, at the close of Januar