1870Paris proclaims the Third Republic
In July 1870 Emperor Napoleon III took France into war with Prussia and its German allies, confident of a quick victory. Instead the French armies were outmanoeuvred and beaten in a few weeks. On 2 September the emperor himself surrendered with an entire army at Sedan, near the Belgian border, and was taken prisoner. When the news reached Paris on the night of 3 September, the capital rose in anger against the regime that had led it to disaster.
On 4 September 1870 crowds invaded the Palais Bourbon, where the legislature sat, and the republican deputies Léon Gambetta and Jules Favre led them across the city to the Hôtel de Ville. There Gambetta proclaimed the Republic, and a Government of National Defence was formed to carry on the war. The Second Empire fell without a shot being fired, and the empress fled to England. The new republic began amid siege, defeat and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871, yet it lasted until 1940, longer than any French regime since the Revolution.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Assemblée nationale: Defeat at Sedan, proclamation of the Republic and provisional government ↗
476The last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, is deposed
In 475 the general Orestes drove the emperor Julius Nepos out of Ravenna and placed his own son Romulus, still a boy, on the Western Roman throne. Mocked as Augustulus, ‘the little emperor’, he had no power of his own. Real strength lay with the army in Italy, made up largely of Germanic soldiers, and when Orestes refused their demand for land of their own, they turned to one of their officers, Odoacer, and proclaimed him king on 23 August 476.
Odoacer defeated and killed Orestes, then took Ravenna and its emperor. The ancient sources do not give an exact day, but the deposition of Romulus took place on or soon after 4 September 476. Odoacer spared the boy because of his youth, gave him a pension and sent him to live with relatives in Campania. Rather than take the imperial title himself, Odoacer sent the regalia to Constantinople and ruled Italy as king. No new emperor was ever named in the West, and 476 became the date traditionally given for the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: De Imperatoribus Romanis (Loyola University Chicago): Romulus Augustulus ↗
1970Salvador Allende wins Chile’s presidential election
Salvador Allende, a doctor and veteran Socialist senator, had stood for the presidency of Chile three times before and lost each time. In 1970 he ran again at the head of Popular Unity, a coalition of Socialists, Communists and smaller left-wing parties, promising to nationalise the great copper mines, speed up land reform and lead Chile peacefully towards socialism.
In the three-way election on 4 September 1970 Allende came first with about 36 per cent of the vote, narrowly ahead of the conservative former president Jorge Alessandri. With no candidate holding a majority, Congress had to choose, and on 24 October it confirmed Allende after he agreed to constitutional guarantees demanded by the Christian Democrats. He took office on 3 November as one of the first Marxists to win the presidency of a country through an open election. The United States worked secretly against his government, and it was overthrown in a military coup in September 1973, during which Allende died.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Security Archive (George Washington University): Allende Wins ↗
1995The UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women opens in Beijing
The United Nations held its first world conference on women in Mexico City in 1975, followed by meetings in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985. Each pushed governments to treat equality between women and men as a matter of law and policy, but progress was slow and uneven, and by the 1990s campaigners wanted a single agreed plan that every country would sign up to.
The Fourth World Conference on Women opened in Beijing on 4 September 1995 and ran until 15 September. More than 17,000 people took part, among them some 6,000 government delegates, while about 30,000 more gathered at a parallel forum for non-governmental groups at Huairou, outside the city. On 5 September the US First Lady Hillary Clinton declared that ‘women’s rights are human rights’. The conference ended with 189 countries adopting the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which set goals in twelve areas, from education and health to violence and political power, and is still the main global plan for gender equality.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United Nations: Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995 ↗
1886Geronimo makes his final surrender
Geronimo, a Bedonkohe Apache war leader, had fought Mexican and American forces for decades as settlers and soldiers pushed into the Apache homelands of the south-west. Confined with his people to the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, he broke out several times, and in May 1885 he fled again into the mountains of northern Mexico with a small band. Thousands of American and Mexican troops spent more than a year hunting a few dozen men, women and children.
Apache scouts finally found the band, and Lieutenant Charles Gatewood persuaded Geronimo to meet General Nelson Miles. On 4 September 1886, in Skeleton Canyon in southern Arizona, Geronimo surrendered, ending the last major armed resistance by the Apache. Miles promised that the Apache would be allowed to return to Arizona, but the promise was broken. Geronimo and hundreds of Chiricahua Apache, including the scouts who had served the army, were sent as prisoners of war to Florida and later Alabama and Oklahoma. Geronimo never saw his homeland again and died at Fort Sill in 1909.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Park Service, Chiricahua National Monument: Post Apache Wars ↗
