Not a Stone of our Fortresses.
The Government will maintain it to the end."
On the morrow, September 21, Gambetta personally reminded us that it was
the seventy-eighth anniversary of the foundation of the first French
Republic, and, after recalling to the Parisians what their fathers had
then accomplished, he exhorted them to follow that illustrious example,
and to "secure victory by confronting death." That same evening the clubs
decided that a great demonstration should be made on the morrow by way of
insisting that no treaty should be discussed until the Germans had been
driven out of France, that no territory, fort, vessel, or treasure should
be surrendered, that all elections should be adjourned, and that a _levee
en masse_ should be decreed. Jules Favre responded that he and his
colleagues personified Defence and not Surrender, and Rochefort--poor
Rochefort!--solemnly promised that the barricades of Paris should be begun
that very night. That undertaking mightily pleased the agitators, though
the use of the said barricades was not apparent; and the demonstrators
dispersed with the usual shouts of "Vive la Republique! Mort aux
Prussiens!"
In connexion with that last cry it was a curious circumstance that from
the beginning to the end of the war the French persistently ignored the
presence of Saxons, Wuertembergers, Hessians, Badeners, and so forth in the
invading armies.
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