In 1859, a young Swiss man named Henry Dunant discovered the horrors of war on the battlefield of Solferino, Italy. He decided to create an international organisation to help people injured in conflicts.

The Red Cross was born.

Born in Geneva on 8 May 1828, Henry Dunant was the son of a very pious and charitable Calvinist family. He dropped out of secondary school and took up an apprenticeship at a Geneva bank. He became involved in social action and dedicated part of his time visiting prisoners and helping the poor.

In 1853, he went to Algeria to head a Swiss colony in Sétif. He sought to build a flour mill, but as he could not get a concession for the land he needed for it to operate, he went to Paris to meet with Napoléon III. But he was leading the Franco-Sardinian troops fighting against the Austrians in northern Italy. Dunant went there to see the Emperor. On 24 June 1859, the day of the battle, he arrived at Castiglione, in Lombardy, a small town near the site of the fighting. The next day he discovered the Solferino battlefield. "At every step, anyone who visited this immense theatre of the fighting the day before saw, in the unprecedented confusion, inexpressible despair and all kinds of misery ". Faced with so much suffering, Dunant took control of the organisation of assistance and managed to ensure that Austrian prisoners would be treated the same way as other soldiers. He also made sure that the Austrian doctors who had been taken prisoner were able to treat the wounded.

Back in Geneva, he wrote Un souvenir de Solferino (A Memory of Solferino, 1862) in which he described the battle and laid out his ideas for improving the fate of wounded soldiers. "Isn’t there a way to set up emergency relief societies whose purpose would be to provide care to the wounded in wartime by impassioned, dedicated, well-qualified volunteers?"

On 17 February 1863, Dunant created a permanent international committee for caring for wounded soldiers which, in 1875, took on the name of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). On 26 October 1863, some fifteen countries took part in the international conference of Geneva that was the Red Cross’s real founding act. Supported by Napoléon III, the committee, for which Dunant was a member and secretary, prepared the Geneva Convention signed by fifteen countries in 1864.

Dunant was now famous and was received by many Heads of State. But his financial affairs were in poor condition – he declared bankruptcy in 1867. Ruined, deep in debt, he had to resign from his position at the International Committee. In Paris, he was reduced to sleeping on park benches. But Empress Eugénie called him to the Tuileries Palace to get his opinion on extending the Geneva Convention to war at sea. Dunant was then named an honorary member of the National Red Cross Societies of Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Prussia and Spain.

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he visited the wounded soldiers brought back to Paris and introduced the use of identification tags, or “dog tags”, to be able to identify the dead.

When peace returned, Dunant went to London where he tried to organise a diplomatic conference to rule on the fate of war prisoners; the Czar encouraged him, but England was hostile to the project. On 1 February 1875, at his initiative, an international conference for "the complete and definitive abolition of the trafficking of negroes and the slave trade" opened in London.

The following years were a time of wandering and poverty: Dunant travelled by foot to Alsace, Germany and Italy; he lived off the charity and hospitality of a few friends. Finally, in 1887, he found himself in a small Swiss town overlooking Lake Constance: Heiden.

Ill, he took refuge at the hospice and that is where a journalist found him in 1895 and wrote an article published in the press throughout Europe a few days later. Dunant suddenly became famous and received honours. He received the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. He died on 30 October 1910.

Source :

In Les Chemins de la Mémoire, 196/July-August 2009 

Adolphe Thiers, historian and statesman, was symbolic of the emerging Third Republic, the "executioner of the Commune" and founder of the Republic. Marie-Louis-Joseph-Adolphe Thiers was born in Marseille into a middle-class family. Helped by the extravagance of his father, the young Adolphe had a brilliant education by means of a scholarship. After studying law in Aix-en-Provence, he settled in Paris in 1821, where he moved in liberal society, embarking on a career as a journalist at Le Constitutionnel, before founding Le National on the 3rd January 1830 with Auguste Mignet and Armand Carrel, opposing through their articles the sovereignty of Charles X. In 1824, with his friend Auguste Mignet, he began a historical account of the Revolution of 1789. Thiers then devoted himself to Napoleon and was the first to provide a complete account, albeit partisan, of his career in his History of the Consulate and the Empire, published between 1845 and 1862 - in addition, in 1936 and 1940, he requested the return of Napoleon's ashes. His works earned his election to the French Academy in December 1834. Politically, Thiers was a "liberal", a man of progress, with a belief in the principle of national sovereignty, expressed through free elections and through representatives controlling the executive.

He played an active role in the July revolution in organising the resistance of those journalists threatened by the "Four Orders" (laws aimed at "muzzling" the press), going so far as to support Louis-Philippe when he came to power. The latter called him into his government as Under-Secretary of State for Finance, Minister of the Interior and then Minister of Agriculture and Trade. He was thus in permanent opposition with legitimists, republicans and the supporters of Bonaparte. During the Second Republic (1848-1851) Thiers worked with a regime that he was to consider "disappointing", as it was too conservative. As a member of parliament, Thiers laid down Proudhon's socialist theses, writing at the time a short treaty for the general public on Property, supporting the Falloux law and the Rome expedition. He was even to go so far as to support the candidate Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte during the presidential elections, but was to oppose the coup d'état of the 2nd December 1851, a stance that was to see him exiled to England, Italy and then Switzerland. Thiers therefore disappeared from the political scene in Napoleon the Third's 's first year in power. He returned to politics to oppose the left under the liberal Empire (1860-1870). "Thiers, who was even classed as an "Orléanist" because of his past from 1830-48, was, in fact, the leader of the handful of royalists who remained faithful to liberalism." (M. Aguhlon). He accepted the Crimean expedition but remained very critical of Napoleon the Third's foreign policy, which he considered too liberal and unsuitable for the Italian peninsula and Germany; he demanded the liquidation of the Mexican expedition.

On the fall of the Second Empire Thiers, who had been elected in the previous Empire elections in 1869, participated in the Government of National Defence, which he ended up managing, having actively contributed since the 10th September 1870 in peace preparations: the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jules Favre, asked him in the name of the government to moderate the offensive policies of the European powers, in particular the ambitions of Bismarck - so, from 1873 until 1875 Thiers carried out a lengthy tour of all the European capitals. Following the signing of the armistice on the 28th January 1871, Thiers was elected head of the new government in the elections of the 8th February 1871. As head of the executive power, he brought the communard movement to an end in a bloodbath in the spring of 1871; he was known as the "executioner of the Commune". The suppression of the Parisian uprising, the "Federates" movement, was led by Thiers with an army of "men of Versailles", the government having then established itself in Versailles. He was at the head of the 63,500 men, reinforced by the 130,000 liberated French prisoners of war and supported by Bismarck, who, between March and June 1871, besieged Paris and the neighbouring villages. The fighting would account for around thirty thousand dead from the ranks of the Federates. Up until 1874, four emergency courts passed judgement on the "Communards": 13,804 sentences were pronounced, including several for the labour camps of Guyana and New Caledonia - there would be no amnesty until July 1880. On the 24th May 1873, the parliamentary right, who had brought him to power, but were hostile to the republican orientation that Thiers gave to the Government, secured his resignation and replaced him with Mac Mahon. Adolphe Thiers died on the 3rd September 1877. Despite the refusal of his family to hold a state funeral, a funeral cortège with 384 wreaths, followed by Gambetta and Hugo, was to turn the final journey of this multi-faceted statesman into a national affair.

Sources: AGUHLON (Maurice), "Adolphe Thiers", in: Célébrations nationales 1997, Paris, Direction des Archives de France. MOURRE (Michel), Dictionnaire encyclopédique d'histoire, Paris, Bordas, 1996 (1978).

Léon Gambetta was born on the 2nd April 1838 in Cahors, the adopted town of his Genoan father Joseph, and Marie Madeleine Orasie Massabie, the daughter of a pharmacist from Molières, a town in the Tarn-et-Garonne region. Whilst still very young, Léon stood out because of his intelligence and tremendous memory. He became a boarder at the lower seminary of Montfaucon before completing his schooling at Cahors grammar school. A candidate in the national education competition, he won the French dissertation prize and then obtained an Arts Baccalaureate in 1856, aged 17. To the great displeasure of his father who wanted him to take over his business, the young man, who was a talented speaker, left for Paris in January 1857 and enrolled in law school to follow a career as a lawyer. He requested and was granted French nationality on the 29th October 1859. He had his vive voce for his law degree on the 19th January the following year and took his oath on the 8th June 1861. His first defence cases set him against parliamentary opposition groups from the "left" (the Republicans). The Baudin subscription affair (1851) made him famous in 1868. This case was brought by the Imperial government against newspapers advocating a subscription with a view to building a monument in memory of this elected representative, who was killed on the 3rd December on the streets of Faubourg Saint-Antoine fighting for the people.

The young lawyer took the opportunity to make a closing speech criticising the regime of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. In January 1870, as member of parliament for the district of Marseille, he stood against the government of Emile Ollivier whose support for Napoléon III was perceived as treachery by the Republicans. However, Gambetta called for national unity and passed a bill for military funding on the eve of war. During the night of the 3rd to the 4th September, Léon Gambetta, after having attempted in vain to appease the revolutionary situation arising from the announcement of the capitulation of Sedan, announced the fall of the Empire in the Bourbon Palace, which had been invaded by the mob. In the Town hall, he witnessed the declaration of the Government for the national defence, with which he became associated alongside Jules Simon and Ernest Picard. On his own initiative he settled in to the ministry of the interior and ordered the dismissal of the prefects of the Empire. At the same time he organised the capital's defences. On the 7th September in a besieged Paris, Léon Gambetta appeared like somebody heaven-sent. Opposite a government that was overwhelmed by the situation, he led the national defence in the provinces. Gambetta was the embodiment of resistance against the Prussian occupier. He took off in a balloon to join the Tours delegation via Montdidier, Amiens and Rouen, adding the war department to his portfolio, setting up new armies, supervising the training and provision of troops, building factories, increasing official visits, with briefings and speeches calling to "prolong the war until extermination". At the same time the capital was subject to a siege by the imperialists: the city was bombarded and the population starved. Adolphe Thiers ended up commissioning (22nd January 1871) Jules Favre, the minister for overseas affairs, to approach Bismarck in order to agree an armistice. Gambetta distanced himself from the political scene and negotiations because of a decree that he signed in Bordeaux making Empire assembly members of ineligible. He resigned on the 6th February.

Gambetta was elected on nine lists during the general elections of the 8th February 1871: in the East, Paris, Marseille and Algeria. He chose the Lower Rhine. He voted against the peace agreement and expressed his intention to recover the lost provinces. Returning from his retreat in Saint-Sébastien and having lost his seat in parliament on the 2nd July, he campaigned in the Bouches-du-Rhône and Seine regions. As MP for the Seine, Gambetta formed an extreme left parliamentary party "the Republican Union", founded a newspaper, La République française, increasing his speeches in the provinces, during which he castigated the conservative policy of the National Assembly and displayed militant anticlericalism. In the commotion of the restored republican sovereignty, he took part in the debates that gave rise to constitutional laws and contributed to the passing of the Walloon amendment on the 28th January 1875. Léon Gambetta then concentrated on promoting the new regime during the electoral ballot campaign of January and February 1876. In Bordeaux (13th February), he outlined the reforms necessary: the separation of the Church from the State, the creation of income tax, the reestablishment of the right to meetings and associations, a measure that he overturned at "opportune" moments for fear of upsetting the rural electorate, who were the demographical majority. The ballot of the 20th February sanctioned his work. Gambetta was elected in several districts and opted for Belleville. Marshal de Mac-Mahon, however, did not call him into his ministry. He preferred figures who were further "to the right". Gambetta took advantage of the crisis that arose from the constitution of the de Broglie ministry to unite the Republican vote and cause the dissolution of the Chamber - it was to be his only victory in his unsuccessful attempt to unite the parties to the left.
A tactician and orator of the highest order, Gambetta made the summer electoral campaign his own, before pronouncing in his speech in Lille (15th August) directed at the President of the Republic, the phrase "accept or resign", a remark that would earn him a conviction of three months in prison, a sentence that he would not serve. Having acceded to "republican sainthood", he preferred however to promote Jules Grévy on the 3rd September to the position of head of State and remain in the background. Political crises followed: Gambetta stood against Marshal de Mac-Mahon with vehemence. He ended up securing his resignation, the latter having refused to sign the decree to lay off ten generals of the army corps (20th January 1879). Refusing once more to head the regime, Gambetta let Jules Grévy succeed Mac-Mahon and contented himself with the presidency of the chamber (31st January 1879). From a symbolic role which he carried out elegantly, Gambetta, who in the eyes of President Grévy no longer represented a political obstacle, rose to the presidency of the council on the 10th November 1881. He thus finally believed it possible to turn France into a stable and peaceful country, reunited around the republican way of thinking. The new head of State tried to establish a large ministry, uniting all of the important figures from the "left". Jules Ferry, Léon Say, Henri Brisson and Charles de Freycinet and the heads of various movements all refused the offer. His government had barely been formed (on the 14th January 1882) when it was toppled after 74 days, following a legislative bill on the ways of appointing senators and electing representatives to the chamber. Freycinet succeeded him, surrounded by those very people who had refused to give him their support.

Léon Gambetta then withdrew from politics. He settled in the Nice area, no longer taking part in debates except for the one on the 18th July 1882 requesting that French presence be maintained in Egypt. Retired to les Jardies (Ville-d'Avray), with his companion Léonie Léon, Gambetta was the victim of a fire arm accident that confined him to bed for the whole of November. This inactivity was fatal for him. He died on the 31st December 1882 following an intestinal infection and appendicitis that was not operated upon. A republican hero, the founding "father" of the Third Republic, Léon Gambetta was an incontrovertible key figure in "helping to understand that a regime that was initially modern and popular, that of Napoléon III, could be replaced by a republic that added to these same qualities, the quality of deep liberalism" (M. Aghulon). His state funeral was held on the 6th January 1883. Monuments were erected to him throughout France: in Bordeaux (25th April 1905), Nice (25th April 1909), etc. The one erected in the Tuileries gardens would disappear under the German occupation.

Son of Antoine Georges François (15 March 1769 - 19 July 1832) and of Julie Verdier de la Coste, François, Ernest Chabaud-Latour was born in Nîmes on 25 January 1804.
He graduated in seventh place from Ecole Polytechnique in 1820 and opted for Engineering. In 1829 he briefly took part, alongside the Russian army, in the siege of the fortified places of Danube, and was then called to Paris to serve in Polignac's ministry.

In 1830 he volunteered to leave for Algiers and was later decorated following the bombing of Fort de l'Empereur and the occupation of Blida.

Appointed Officer of Honour of the Duke of Orléans, a role he performed until the Prince's death in 1842, he took part in the campaign of Belgium and the taking of Antwerp. Chabaud-Latour also followed the Duke of Orléans during the Algeria campaigns (1837, 1839, 1840) and took part in events in Sig, Habra, Mascara, and then, in 1839, in the battle of Portes de Fer, which earned him the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honour and, in 1840, in the combats of Medea, El-Affroun, Col de Mouzaïa and Bois des Oliviers.

In 1840, when the issue of fortifications for Paris was raised, he recommended, in his preliminary project, the construction of a continuous fortified wall and a ring of forts to protect the population from the rigours of a siege.

As deputy of the Gard (1837 to 1848, Guizot ministry) he was able to defend his project in front of Parliament.

As head of engineering, he personally took care of the Eastern sector of the Paris wall and supervised work until 1846.

He was promoted lieutenant-colonel in 1842 and became the aide-de-camp for the Count of Paris when the Duke of Orléans died. In 1846 he was made a Colonel and left to command the 3rd engineering regiment in Arras. In February 1848 he was still loyal to the Orléans family, to the point of offering to resign following the king's abdication. Placed on non-active status for a few weeks, he was called to the Amiens engineering department and then, following the coup d'état on 2 December 1851, he returned to his duties in Grenoble.

He was commander-in-chief of engineering in Algeria in 1852, where he remained for five years, taking part in the Babors expedition in 1853, the Beni-Iuya expedition in 1854, the Guetchoula expedition in 1855 and the Grande-Kabylie expedition in 1857. A talented planner, he built the Tizi-Ouzou to Souk-el-Arba road in 16 days and he had Fort-Napoléon built in four months, in the centre of the Béni Raten tribe. He also managed the building of dams on rivers and created several villages.

Brigadier General on 30 April 1853, Chabaud-Latour was promoted to Division General after the campaigns of 1857 and 1858, date of his return to Paris. He was called to the fortifications committee, to the general inspectorate of fortified places, engineering regiments and Ecole polytechnique, and to the advisory committee on Algerian affairs. During the war in Italy, he commanded the engineering corps posted on the Eastern frontier for observation duties. He became Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1861, president of the fortifications committee in 1864, and then reserve cadre on 25 January 1869.

Called back to activity in 1870, Chabaud-Latour was put in charge of engineering of the Paris defence system and took over chairmanship of the fortifications committee. He renovated the capital's fortified camp so that it could only be bombed on its left bank from the unfinished redoubts of Châtillon and Montretout.

His son, Arthur Henri Alphonse (1839-1910), from his marriage with Hélène Mathilde Périer, a graduate of St Cyr, proved himself during battles of the Loire and received the Legion of Honour for his exemplary behaviour. Lissagaray wrote the following: "This Paris, for which Hoche, Marceau, Kleber would have been neither too young, nor too faithful, nor too pure, had for generals the residue of the Empire and Orleanism, Vinoy of December, Ducrot, Luzanne, Leflô, and a fossil like Chabaud-Latour."

The wall, commonly called the Thiers wall, measured 35 kilometres long (its line corresponds to the current ring road) and had 94 bastions, 17 doors and 8 sally-ports.  In some parts, the base was made of 40 centimetres of concrete. The exterior pavement, like the side walls, was made of millstone and a succession of rubble bonded by hydraulic mortar. Appointed Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour for this, he was kept in activity with no age limit.

He was elected deputy of the Gard in February at the National Assembly – on the centre right – and chaired the army commission in charge of writing the 1872 military law. He was also rapporteur for the draft project on new forts to be built around Paris and was Vice-President of the Assembly several times. Chabaud-Latour was a member of the defence committee and put his talent to organising the new Eastern border.

An eminent character of the State, he was appointed in 1873 to judge Marshal Bazaine, accused of contributing to the defeat of France during the war between France and Germany in 1870.

Called on 20 July 1874 by Marshal de Mac-Mahon to Home Affairs duties until 10 March 1875, he supported the Duke of Broglie, in full debate concerning the  seven-year plan. He failed in the Senate elections on 30 January 1876 but was appointed irremovable senator on 10 November in the following year.

He died in Paris on 10 June 1885 after falling down the stairs in the Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Ouest, of which he was administrator.
 

NAPOLEON III (Paris, 20 April 1808-Chiselhurst, 9 January 1873)

Third son of Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland and Napoleon I's brother, and of Hortense de Beauharnais, the Emperor's sister-in-law. His tutor was the son of Convention member Le Bas, who instilled him with a love for the history of the French Revolution. In 1830 he left for Italy in his uncle's footsteps, joined the carbonari movement and took part in Menotti's uprising against Pope Gregory XVI in Romagna. The mantle of Bonapartist legitimacy passed to Louis Napoleon after the Duke of Reichstadt's death in 1832. With Persigny's help, on 30 October 1836 he unsuccessfully tried to rouse an uprising of the Strasbourg garrison. Louis-Philippe exiled him to Brazil. From there he went to the United States, moving in 1837 to England, where he defended his idea of "democratic Caesarism" in his book Les Idées napoléoniennes (1839) and took advantage of the Bonapartist fervour sweeping France after word spread that Napoleon's ashes would be brought to Paris. After another unsuccessful attempt to lead an uprising, this time in Boulogne on 6 August 1840, he was arrested, tried before the Court of Peers, sentenced to life in prison and locked up in Fort Ham (Somme). In May 1846 he escaped and fled to England. Although judged undesirable on French soil, in June 1848 Louis Napoleon was elected to the assembly in five departments, taking his seat three months later.

The ambitious deputy was a dreadful public speaker but worked hard to win the conservatives' backing. He harangued crowds and grew closer to the army, which was feeling nostalgic for the Empire. In December 1848 he was elected president with a five-million vote lead over his rivals. On 2 December 1851 Louis Napoleon staged a coup d'Etat, approved by plebiscite on the 20th and 21st. Having amended the constitution beforehand, he became president for 10 years and concentrated all power in his hands. He began a series of forays into the French provinces in order to prepare public opinion for the plebiscite on 21 and 22 November 1852, which proclaimed him emperor. He became Napoleon III on 2 December 1852. Like Napoleon I, he wanted to join the small circle of European dynasties, marrying a Spanish aristocrat, Eugénie Marie de Montijo, on 30 January 1853. From 1852 to 1860, Napoleon III held absolute power on the basis of universal suffrage, which always gave him overwhelming majorities but whose orientation was guided by the mechanism of the "official candidacy". The regime's pillars of support were the old Orleanist bourgeoisie, Catholics and business circles. Political life stagnated and a sense of oppression came over the whole country: the legitimist opposition remained silent, observing the Count of Chambord's instructions to abstain; the republican opposition was decapitated; civil servants were forced to swear a loyalty oath to the emperor; the prefects had nearly unlimited power; the press was gagged by censorship, the high price of stamps and the system of "warnings"; and literature met with a similar fate. But it was also a gilded age of pomp and lavish splendour. Offenbach was the toast of Paris and seaside resorts became fashionable. Haussmann, the prefect of Paris from 1853 to 1869, reshaped the city's face: the result remains the symbol of the economic upsurge during this period. France entered the industrial age: big banks sprang up (Crédit foncier and the Pereire brothers' Crédit mobilier in 1852, Crédit industriel et commercial in 1859, etc.); transport developed (3,100km of railroad tracks in 1851, 17,000 by the end of the Empire); and department stores opened (Le Bon Marché, Le Louvre, Le Printemps, La Samaritaine). Napoleon III's bargaining skills at the Congress of Paris put an end to the Crimean War (1854-1856), boosting his international prestige. He intervened in the creation of the kingdom of Romania and took an active part in Italy's unification, in exchange for which France annexed Nice and Savoy. His Italian policy cost him support among Catholics, who defended the pope's temporal power. Orsini's assassination attempt (14 January 1858) did not damage the Empire but symbolised the conservatives' discontent and enabled the emperor to tighten his grip on power: the general security act of 19 February 1858 allowed him to intern or deport political prisoners without trial.

With conservative support waning, from 1860 to 1870 Napoleon III turned to the liberals. The decree of 24 November 1860 gave the legislature more independence and power of initiative and heralded the return to public life of the republicans, who demanded the repeal of the general security act, restoration of freedom of the press and assembly, and won 32 seats in the 1863 elections. The government bowed: the anticlerical professor Victor Duruy was named education minister (1863-1869), the right to strike and assemble was granted in April 1864, the independence of the press was restored in May 1868, etc. But Napoleon III kept exclusive control of foreign policy and started building an empire, which eventually alarmed the other powers. During the Mexico expedition (1861-1867) he tried to create a great Latin, Catholic empire in Central America in order to curry favour with the Vatican. It came to a tragic end with the execution of the emperor of Mexico, Maximilian von Habsburg. During the Battle of Camerone on 30 April 1863, the three officers and 62 foreign legionnaires of Captain Danjou's company held off 2,000 Mexicans for a whole day; the date has become the Foreign Legion's anniversary. Napoleon III also completed the conquest of Algeria, tightened France's colonial grip on New Caledonia and Senegal, annexed Obock (Red Sea), posed as the defender of Syria's Christians, encouraged the building of the Suez Canal (1859-1869), intervened in China alongside England (1860) and took possession of Cochinchina (1863). In Europe, the Emperor of the French chose a more ambiguous policy, pursuing his goal of weakening Austria. He contributed to the formation of Italy and in October 1865 backed Prussian chancellor Bismarck's push to create a German State during their meeting in Biarritz, trying to negotiate the annexation of land on the other side of the Rhine.

It was not until Prussia's stunning defeat of Austria at Sadowa (3 July 1866) that Napoleon III became aware of the threat from that country and gave his foreign policy a new thrust. He began reorganising the army with the 1867-1868 Niel reform and helped Pius IX in Rome in order to win the backing of French Catholics and Orleanists. In the 1869 elections the republicans increased their ranks in the Assembly: Emile Ollivier joined the government in January 1870. The Empire became parliamentary. Abroad, French policy annoyed Italy and Prussia, which became closer as Bismarck discredited France and Europe. A Hohenzollern filled the vacant Spanish throne, threatening France with encirclement. Bismarck used the hostility caused by France's demands to complete Germany's unification. In the "Ems dispatch" the Iron Chancellor changed the report on the meeting between Benedetti and the Hohenzollerns in such as way as to leave Napoleon III with no other choice but to declare war, which he did on 19 July 1870. Prussian troops dealt the Empire a death blow, capturing Froeschwiller, Forbach and Rezonville-Gravelotte in the first half of August and surrounding Bazaine in Metz. Napoleon III surrendered in Sedan on 2 September, narrowly escaping the firing squad. Gambetta announced the fall of the empire at the Bourbon Palace. On 4 September the Republic was proclaimed at the Paris city hall. Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was brought to Wilhelmshöhe, Hesse in captivity. Released shortly thereafter, he joined Eugénie de Montijo at Camden Place in Chislehurst, Kent. Like his uncle, he died of disease in exile (of progressive fiber dysplasia).