Australian National Archives staff keen to discover fate of man who wrote to his mother in Normandy during Franco-Prussian warA letter from a man to his mother that was flown out of Paris by hot-air balloon during the Prussian siege in 1870 has turned up in Australia’s National Archives,where staff are keen to discover the family’s fate.
Germans surrounded Paris for more than four months that year during the Franco-Prussian war. Balloon mail was the only way that communications from Paris could reach the rest of France. Dozens of flights were made, mostly at night, or hundreds of thousands of letters delivered.
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Source: theguardian.com