Paris, Siege of

During the Franco-Prussian War, Prussian siege of the city of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871; the war came to an end with the fall of Paris and the city's terms of surrender were incorporated into a general armistice.

After the defeat of the French armies in the field, Paris was the last vestige of French resistance and Count Helmuth von Moltke invested the city in September 1870 with 240,000 troops and upwards of 300 siege guns as well as field artillery. Paris was nominally under the command of General Louis Trochu, with about 400,000 troops of varying quality, but political dissension and sheer incompetence hampered French military efforts. The French made a number of ineffectual sorties but they were all beaten back by the Prussians. Despite this, the actual defence of the city itself was conducted tenaciously, largely in the hope that citizen's armies, raised in the provinces, would be able to come to the aid of the capital. However, these armies were totally untrained and the efforts they made to break through the Prussian lines were in vain. Von Moltke initially expected starvation to cause resistance to collapse quite quickly, but when the siege wore on he massed siege artillery and began bombarding the city. This, combined with shortage of food and a general collapse of morale, led to the city's surrender on 28 January 1871.