On October 7th, 1870 - 129 years ago today - a balloon ascended from the Gare du Nord in Paris. In its gondola was no less a personage than Leon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior of the newly-proclaimed Third Republic. His objective was to sail safely over the heads of the Prussian army camped around the city, and in this he was successful. He landed some distance to the south, outside the Prussian ring, and subsequently tried - albeit less unsuccessfully - to organise the French to liberate their capital.
The Franco-Prussian War had begun earlier that year, and at the time it was welcomed by both sides. To Bismarck, it was a clever ploy to engender German solidarity and create a German Empire centred on Berlin. Napoleon III of France, on the other hand, looked to a successful war to restore the glitter of his jaded court, whose tinsel had been tarnished by a succession of military and diplomatic reverses in preceding years.
By early autumn, however, the Emperor Napoleon was defeated, and by September 20th the Prussians had surrounded Paris. A stalemate lasting several months ensued: the Prussians were not strong enough to take the city and the French were incapable of breaking out. During this famous Siege of Paris, its beleaguered citizens survived sans food, sans hope, sans almost any contact with the outside world.
But Paris had a partial answer to the German ring of steel embracing it. Soon after the siege began, the citizens began to make balloons from cotton, and when these were filled with coal gas, they could be sent aloft with men and messages.
The balloons, released at night, rose under cover of darkness to come to ground wherever they might be taken by the wind. They wafted 164 persons to safety over the powerless Prussians' heads, and the "balloon-post" carried some two million letters to the outside world.
If the ascent on the night of October 7th, 1870, was the most historically significant, that of November 24th was the most spectacular. On that occasion the two balloonists, Rolier and Beziers, ascended in a gentle south-east breeze, and confidently assumed they were headed for unoccupied north-western France.
But after many adventures, during which they seldom saw the ground for fog and cloud, the pair brought their aircraft to within 50 feet of the ground and jumped - not into France, but into the snow of a Norwegian mountain. They had travelled over 900 miles from Paris in 15 hours, a voyage worthy of even the most ambitious of the heroes of Jules Verne.