Esquisse pour le cabinet du Préfet à l'Hôtel de Ville : La sortie des troupes durant Le siège de Paris en 1870

Baudoüin's sketch for the prefect's cabinet at the Hôtel de Ville depicts troops departing during the Siege of Paris in 1870-71, part of his extensive decorative program commemorating the Franco-Prussian War for the city's most important administrative building. The Siege of Paris, in which the city was surrounded by Prussian forces for nearly five months, killing thousands through starvation and bombardment, was a defining trauma of Third Republic identity. Official commemoration of the siege in public buildings transformed collective suffering into civic myth — the endurance and defiance of Paris as an expression of republican virtue.

The departure scene is organized around the movement of figures from the picture's depth toward the viewer — soldiers in grey-blue uniforms against the wintry pale stone of Haussmann's Paris. The sketch captures a moment of frozen urgency, the compositional diagonal of the departing column creating forward momentum.