August 6, 1870 · Alsace Theater

The Battle of Wörth — fought simultaneously with a second Prussian victory at Spicheren on the same day — shattered Marshal MacMahon's Army of Alsace in the war's opening phase. The Crown Prince's Third Army attacked MacMahon's position on the hills above the Sauer River despite orders to wait, triggering a general engagement that MacMahon had not sought. Repeated Prussian infantry assaults were repulsed with heavy losses until weight of numbers and the encircling threat to MacMahon's flanks forced a French retreat that became a rout. The last French cuirassier charge of the war — horsemen in breastplates and helmets from another era, riding into needle-gun and artillery fire — was annihilated on the slopes above Wörth.

August 18, 1870 · Lorraine Theater

The bloodiest day of the Franco-Prussian War was fought on the plateau west of Metz, where Bazaine's Army of the Rhine held a strong defensive position anchored on the village of St. Privat in the north and Gravelotte in the south. Moltke attempted to envelop both flanks simultaneously. On the German right, frontal assaults against St. Privat by the Prussian Guard — advancing in close order across open ground against French chassepot rifles — were catastrophic: the Guard lost 8,000 men in twenty minutes in one of the most costly attacks in nineteenth-century warfare. The village only fell when Saxon forces completed the northern envelopment. On the German left at Gravelotte, equally costly frontal assaults eventually broke French resistance through sheer weight of numbers.

August 19, 1870 · Lorraine Theater

Following Gravelotte, Marshal Bazaine's Army of the Rhine — 180,000 men, the largest and best-equipped French force in existence — retreated into the fortress city of Metz and was surrounded by the German Second Army under Prince Friedrich Karl. Bazaine conducted several sorties that accomplished nothing and eventually ceased all offensive effort, conducting what his critics characterized as a passive defense amounting to deliberate inaction. Food and ammunition ran low through September and October. Bazaine entered into negotiations with the enemy and with the deposed imperial government about political arrangements that might justify a capitulation. On October 27, 1870, the garrison surrendered: 173,000 French soldiers became prisoners of war, together with 1,570 cannon. It was the largest surrender in French history.

September 1, 1870 · Ardennes Theater

The most decisive battle of the war was fought in the bend of the Meuse River near Sedan, where MacMahon's Army of Châlons — attempting to relieve Metz — was surrounded by two German armies moving in a pincer movement of extraordinary coordination. MacMahon was wounded early in the battle and command passed to Ducrot and then Wimpffen in rapid succession, neither able to impose coherence on a collapsing situation. German artillery — 500 guns ringing the French position from the surrounding heights — fired with devastating effect into the confined space. Napoleon III, who had joined the army and rode through the battle seeking a death that refused to come, finally ordered the white flag raised at 4 PM. He then wrote to King Wilhelm I: 'Not having been able to die in the midst of my troops, nothing remains for me but to surrender my sword to Your Majesty.'

September 19, 1870 · Île-de-France Theater

The siege of Paris lasted 131 days, from September 19, 1870 to January 28, 1871. A city of two million people was surrounded by German forces and systematically starved. Food ran out progressively: horses were eaten first, then zoo animals (the elephant Castor and Pollux were sold as steaks), then rats and cats. Bread was adulterated with sawdust. A daily ration fell to 300 calories toward the siege's end. German artillery began a deliberate bombardment of the city in January 1871, killing hundreds of civilians and producing international outrage but no change in the military situation. Multiple sorties by the Paris garrison failed to break through the siege lines. When the armistice was finally signed on January 28, Paris was on the verge of outright famine.

October 7, 1870 · Paris Theater

With Paris surrounded by German forces and all land communication cut, the Government of National Defense used hot-air balloons to maintain contact with the provinces. On October 7, 1870, Minister of the Interior Léon Gambetta departed Paris in a balloon, was nearly shot down by German rifle fire, nearly crashed in a tree, and landed in the Vosges before making his way to Tours, where he threw himself into the task of organizing national resistance with extraordinary energy. In the following months Gambetta raised new armies — the Armies of the Loire, the North, and the East — from scratch, conscripting hundreds of thousands of men, improvising arms and equipment, and attempting to organize a levée en masse that might relieve Paris before it starved.

January 18, 1871 · Paris Region Theater

In the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles — the symbol of French royal glory and Louis XIV's assertion of European dominance — the German princes and generals assembled on January 18, 1871, to proclaim the German Empire. King Wilhelm I of Prussia was declared Kaiser (Emperor) of Germany. Bismarck had stage-managed the event to place the proclamation in the most symbolically humiliating location imaginable for France: the palace Louis XIV had built as the embodiment of French greatness, eleven miles from a besieged Paris. The ceremony was conducted while French civilians in Paris were dying of starvation and German shells fell on the city.

March 18, 1871 · Paris Theater

Six weeks after the armistice, Paris erupted in revolution. The Commune — the radical municipal government that controlled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871 — was the product of four compounding tensions: the humiliation of defeat, the rage of an armed working class that had defended the city for months while bourgeois politicians negotiated surrender, the political radicalism of the Parisian labor movement, and the specific fury at the new National Assembly's plan to disarm the National Guard and move the government to Versailles. The Commune enacted a cascade of radical measures: separation of church and state, free education, the right of workers to take over abandoned workshops, abolition of interest on debts. The Versailles government surrounded the city and waited. The Semaine Sanglante — Bloody Week — began on May 21, 1871, when government troops entered Paris through an unguarded gate. Street fighting of extraordinary violence lasted six days. Communards shot hostages including the Archbishop of Paris. Government troops executed prisoners and suspects on a massive scale — conservative estimates put the dead at 10,000, some historians argue for 20,000 or more. The last Communards made their final stand in the Père Lachaise cemetery on May 28.

May 10, 1871 · Germany Theater

The Treaty of Frankfurt, signed on May 10, 1871, formally ended the Franco-Prussian War on terms that Bismarck had deliberately made severe enough to cripple France for a generation. France ceded Alsace (except Belfort) and the northeastern portion of Lorraine — approximately 1.6 million people and the iron-ore deposits of the Lorraine basin — to the new German Empire. France agreed to pay a war indemnity of five billion francs — an unprecedented sum — within three years, with German troops occupying northeastern France as guarantee. Bismarck's advisers had argued against taking Alsace-Lorraine on the grounds that it would make France a permanent enemy; Moltke and the generals insisted. Bismarck, uncharacteristically, yielded to military pressure.