It was then not dissociated with insurrection and revolutionary ardours, Opportunist Republicans such as Jules Ferry or Gambetta adapting it to the new political conditions.

The most natural leader to pick following this republican victory at the polls would have been Leon Gambetta.

In the 1880s, there was a debate between those, such as Georges Clemenceau ( Radical ), Jean Jaurès ( Socialist ) and Maurice Barrès ( nationalist ), who argued that colonialism diverted France from the " blue line of the Vosges " ( referring to Alsace-Lorraine ), and the " colonial lobby ", such as Jules Ferry ( moderate republican ), Léon Gambetta ( republican ) and Eugène Etienne, the president of the parliamentary colonial group.

Dispatched from Paris as the republican government's emissary, Léon Gambetta passed over the German lines in a balloon inflated with coal gas from the city's gasworks, and organized the recruitment of new French armies.

Gambetta had hoped for a republican majority in the general elections on 8 February 1871.

He frequently ridiculed the cult with which Rosetti surrounded figures of international republicanism, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi and Léon Gambetta, and indicated that the National Liberal public had very vague and impractical notions of what a republican state actually implied.

Because he did not consider a working and orderly parliamentary democracy possible in France, he constantly favoured strong men, such as Napoleon III and later the republican leader Léon Gambetta, to lead the country.

She established a salon which was frequented by Gambetta and the other republican leaders against the conservative reaction of the 1870s.

Meanwhile his independence and outspokenness had alienated him from many of his party, and throughout his life he was frequently in conffict with his political associates, from Léon Gambetta downwards.

Along with other followers of " Opportunist " Léon Gambetta, Poincaré founded the Democratic Republican Alliance ( ARD ) in 1902, which became the most important center-right party under the Third Republic.

A few days later chance brought him in contact with one of the few statesmen who had shown any sympathy with the researches of Matthew Dreyfus-the Alsatian Scheurer-Kestner, former member of the Chamber of Deputies for Alsace and coworker with Gambetta, and now vice-president of the Senate and one of the most justly esteemed men of the Republican party.

Early in his political career, Gambetta was influenced by Le Programme de Belleville, the seventeen statutes that defined the radical program in French politics throughout the Third Republic.

Two days later, on 4 September 1870, Leon Gambetta proclaimed a new republic in France.

A delegation of Parisian diplomats arrived in Tours by train on 5 February to negotiate with Gambetta, and the following day Gambetta stepped down and surrendered control of the provincial armies to the Government of National Defence, which promptly ordered a ceasefire across France.

Gambetta proclaiming the Republic of France, from the painting by Howard Pyle.

Gambetta, disgusted with the Assembly's unwillingness to fight resigned and quit France for San Sebastián in Spain.

Despite his earlier career, Gambetta voiced his opposition to the Commune in a letter to Antonin Proust, his former secretary while Minister of the Interior, in which he referred to the Commune as " les horribles aventures dans lesquelles s ’ engage ce qui reste de cette malheureuse France ".

As a small-scale producer during the decades of the Second Industrial Revolution in France, Joseph Gambetta had chain groceries taking business away from his establishment.

Gambetta rendered France three inestimable services: by preserving her self-respect through the gallantry of the resistance he organized during the Franco-Prussian War, by his tact in persuading extreme partisans to accept a moderate Republic, and by his energy in overcoming the usurpation attempted by the advisers of Marshal MacMahon.

That Gambetta after 1875 felt strongly that the relations between France and Germany might be improved, and that he made it his object, by travelling incognito, to become better acquainted with Germany and the adjoining states, may be accepted, but M. Laur appears to have exaggerated the extent to which any actual negotiations took place.

From 1881 to 1884, his activity in Tunisia so raised the prestige of France that it drew from Gambetta the celebrated declaration, L ' Anticléricalisme n ' est pas un article d ' exportation, and led to the exemption of Algeria from the application of the decrees concerning the religious orders.

The antic bridge is destroyed and replaced in 1879 by the pont Bernard-Palissy, a few meters upstream ; the avenue Gambetta and the place Bassompierre are formed ; the train station, the Gare de Saintes, the prison, the Haras national de Saintes, the parc Pierre-Mendès France, the Jardin public Fernand Chapsal and the protected area of the prairie de la Palu were subsequently created.

Later when Paris was encircled by German troops, Gambetta fled Paris by means of a hot air balloon and he became the virtual dictator of the war effort which was carried on from the rural provinces.

When news hit Paris of Emperor Napoleon's III capture, the French Second Empire was overthrown in a bloodless and successful coup d ' état which was launched by General Trochu, Jules Favre, and Léon Gambetta at Paris on 4 September.

At the crisis of 1870, which brought about the Empire's end, he became mayor of Montélimar, and thenceforward was a steady supporter of Léon Gambetta.

He was summoned by Gambetta to Bordeaux to lecture on history, and thence to Versailles to take his seat in the senate to which he had been chosen by the département of the Seine.

Gambetta seized his opportunity and attacked both the coup d ' état and the government with a vigour which made him immediately famous.

Five artists, Jules Bastien-Lepage, a realist painter, Antonin Proust, defensor of the vanguard who Gambetta had named Minister of Beaux-Arts, Léon Bonnat, an academic painter, Alexandre Falguière, who did his mortuary mask, and his personal photographer Étienne Carjat all sat at his death-bed, making five widely different representations of him which were each published by the press the following day.

Her influence on Gambetta was absorbing, both as lover and as politician, and the correspondence which has been published shows how much he depended upon her.

On October 7 the bell which weighs is placed on a harnessed carriage of sixteen horses ; it is descended from the plain by the street Thiers, the alleys Leon Gambetta, it street Carpet-Green, it Belsunce course, Canebière, it street Paradise, it Pierre-Puget course.

During the siege of Paris he left the city in a balloon and joined Gambetta, for whom he organized a system of spies through which General Trochu was kept informed of the strength and disposition of the Prussians around Paris.

( Gambetta ) Vallès was freed from prison and took part in the popular manifestations leading to the formation of the " Comité central républicain des Vingt arrondissements " of which he-like many other leaders of the Paris Commune-became a prominent member ; heading even, for a while, a bataillon of the " Garde nationale ".

His first speech in the House was the occasion ( 21 May 1872 ) of violent attacks by Audiffret-Pasquier and Léon Gambetta.

During the 16 May 1877 crisis, Gambetta, in a speech at Lille on 15 August called on President MacMahon se soumettre ou se démettre, to submit to parliament's majority or to resign.

Gambetta Square at the end of the 19th century

But at Bordeaux, Gambetta, who had issued a proclamation excluding from the elections those who had been officials under the Empire, was all-powerful.

During the political crisis of the next few years he was recognized by the Opportunist Republicans as the successor of Jules Ferry and Gambetta, and at the crisis of 1899 on the fall of the Charles Dupuy cabinet he was asked by President Émile Loubet to form a government.

When the news of the disaster at Sedan reached Paris, Gambetta called for strong measures.

This advice was rejected because of fear of another revolution in Paris, and a delegation to organize resistance in the provinces was despatched to Tours, but when this was seen to be ineffective, Gambetta himself ( 7 October ) left Paris in a hot air balloon – the " Armand-Barbès " – and upon arriving at Tours took control as minister of the interior and of war.

When Adolphe Thiers resigned in May 1873, and a Royalist, Marshal MacMahon, was placed at the head of the government, Gambetta urged his friends to a moderate course.

After studying law at Dijon, he went to Paris, where he was called to the bar, and became close to Léon Gambetta, collaborating with him in 1868 in the foundation of the Revue politique.

He died suddenly, while commanding the VI Corps ( stationed nearest to the German frontier ), at Châlons-sur-Marne now Châlons-en-Champagne, only a few days after Leon Gambetta, and his remains received a state funeral.

It was at a conference held between Say, Gambetta and M. de Freycinet in 1878 that the great scheme of public works introduced by the latter was adopted.

* Roman Amphitheatre – remains of an oval amphitheatre were revealed when the underground carpark was excavated at the Place Gambetta, just west of, and partially beneath, Boulevard Gambetta in the city centre.

Ultimately, however, Faidherbe was ordered by Minister of War Leon Gambetta to attack the Prussians – Faidherbe rushed into an open battle at St Quentin and his army was destroyed.

Among his more important works, may also be mentioned the portrait of Mme J. Drouet ( 1883 ); Gambetta on his death-bed, and some landscapes ; The Vintage ( 1880 ), and The Thames at London ( 1882 ).

The town features a large number of residences built in the 17th and 18th centuries along the Quai de L ' Infante, Rue Mazarin, Rue Gambetta and at the Place Louis XIV.

At this time French traders, encouraged by Léon Gambetta, established themselves on the lower river, thus rendering it difficult for the company to obtain territorial rights ; but the Frenchmen were bought out in 1884, so that at the Berlin Conference on West Africa in 1885, Goldie, present as an expert on matters relating to the river, was able to announce that on the lower Niger the British flag alone flew.

At this time French traders, encouraged by Léon Gambetta, established themselves on the lower river, thus rendering it difficult for the company to obtain territorial rights ; but the Frenchmen were bought out in 1884, so that at the Berlin Conference on West Africa in 1885, Goldie, present as an expert on matters relating to the river, was able to announce that on the lower Niger the British flag alone flew.

* July 14-The Monument à Léon Gambetta, by Jean-Paul Aubé, is inaugurated at the Louvre