ABSTRACT
The provisional government set up in Paris in September 1870 had to choose between two fundamentally different ways of responding to the Prussian invasion. It advocated by the young republican Lon Gambetta, the new government's minister of the interior, the other by the seventy-three-year-old Adolphe Thiers, architect of the Orlanist takeover in 1830 and former leader of the conservative "Party of Order" during the Second Republic of 1848. In Europe of 1875, however, the Third Republic's adoption of universal suffrage and its rejection of monarchy remained exceptional. The universal suffrage Bismarck introduced in the new German Empire disguised the fact that real power remained in the hands of the emperor, the ministers, and the army. The republicans were equally determined to change the place of women in French society. France's military situation was too compromised to give efforts to reverse the outcome of the war much chance to succeed.
