The Third Battle for, and Liberation of, Paris
However, while the Second Battle of Paris had resulted in costly failure for the French Empire, the Austrian Empire was enjoying significant success in its own offences.
In Bavaria, Austro-Spanish forces had completed the encirclement of the city of Munich (thus avoiding a headlong rush into the type of urban fighting which had bled the French so thin in Paris) and their Bohemian allies had performed even better, overrunning most of the imperial state of Saxony and pushing into southern Brandenburg and seizing the city of Cottbus.
The encirclement of Munich would, crucially, allow it to fall easily to the League armies and by the end of May the capital of Bavaria was in Austrian hands.
League forces were also doing well in Scotland where the last German-held Scottish city had been reached by English, Welsh and French armies.
And in France itself, the French armies, as if to make up for their failure at Paris, had continued to drive the Reichsheer back through Burgundy and lower Champagne with massive battles taking place at Auxerre where the defenders of Vichy seized the opportunity for revenge against their German foes.
Auxerre fell on the 25th of May followed, in quick succession, by Chaumont on the 29th.
Emboldened by this new success, and taking advantage of the troops freed up by the shortening of the front line, Franco-Spanish forces launched a fresh attack on Paris - at this point defended entirely by the Reichsheer with a force consisting of two divisions of infantry and one panzer tank division.
Up against the combined might of the underequipped but large Spanish forces and the smaller but well trained and well equipped Imperial French Army, it was clear that the Third Battle of Paris could have but one outcome, with German reinforcements to the city crumbling under the weight of the massed tank divisions of France.
By this point it was abundantly clear that the German-backed Kingdom of France was doomed with increasingly accurate Imperial French intelligence reports revealing an army reduced to just seven depleted infantry divisions and a fourth-rate navy. Indeed, only the Royal French Air Fleet remained in any kind of respectable shape - due to the withdrawal of its seven fighter squadrons and seven bomber squadrons to German territory to protect the Rhineland from bombing raids.
With the fall of Paris on the 9th of June the Royal French government was relocated to Amiens, losing many of its number on the way due to defections, while the Hohenzollern King ‘Francois’ of France, having stayed in Paris as long as his forces held it, fled to Prussia to join the court of the young Kaiser Wilhelm IV who remained under effective house-arrest by the German military government.
But even as the German pretender to the throne of France fled Paris, Napoleon IV was making his first arrival in the city which his family had been barred from entering ever since the fall of the Second French Empire in the vanguard of the liberating army.
Parisians, despite the war time deprivations they had suffered, thronged the streets to see their new ruler - and to take their share of the food, clothing and blankets being dispensed by the French army at the “personal order of the Emperor Napoleon, liberator of France”.
Given that Parisians had, in the space of just ten years, known dictatorial Communard rule, German occupation and then the rule of a German king, the welcome received by yet another ruler was predictably muted.
Nonetheless, Napoleon IV was at least French and had beaten the hated Germans - something which had guaranteed the non-hostile reception he received and even resulted in a few French imperial flags being waved by the more enthusiastically Bonapartist members of the crowd.
Many variations on the official Imperial Standard were seen with most of the variations revolving around mistakes in the design and number of the golden bees on the standard - a problem which continues to face young French school children to this day.
But it was only in his “spontaneous” speech (recently declassified records reveal that it was in fact carefully written in advance by the Ministry of Propaganda) at the ruins of the Eiffel Tower that the Emperor began to win the hearts of Parisians by pledging not only to restore the City of Light as the capital of a united France and to rebuild the Eiffel Tower, but to also uphold the spirit of the “true French Revolution” in building a land of prosperity and hope for all Frenchmen.