The Franco-Prussian War would be a turning point in nineteenth-century French military thinking, one that gave new impetus to those who saw in France's revolutionary past an answer to the problems of the present. In part, of course, this stemmed from the sheer scale of the defeat suffered by Napoleon III's armies, and by the humiliating speed of their collapse. The armies of the Second Empire were constructed on three principles which France had consistently applied since the Restoration and the recruitment law of Gouvion Saint-Cyr: the soldiers were long-service recruits, they were selected by ballot, and those who could afford to buy themselves out were authorised by law to do so. The nation was shocked by the enormity of the defeat in 1870, inflicted not by a massive coalition of foreign powers of the kind France had faced in the past, but by a single state with a population scarcely larger than France's own. But it was not just public opinion that was shocked. So, too, was the high command, which had been so determined in its insistence that France's small, highly trained army was necessarily more effective in the field than armies based on wider recruitment where military service was a kind of rite of passage to adulthood and citizenship. They had gone into this war without trepidation, confident of the quality of their troops and training, buoyed by their successes in Africa and with a reassuring belief that their weaponry was as good as any in the world.