When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Italian public opinion heavily favored the Prussians, and many Italians attempted to sign up as volunteers at the Prussian embassy in Florence. After the French garrison was recalled from Rome, the Italian Army captured the Papal States without Garibaldi's assistance. Following the wartime collapse of the Second French Empire at the Battle of Sedan, Garibaldi, undaunted by the recent hostility shown to him by the men of Napoleon III, switched his support to the newly declared French Third Republic. On 7 September 1870, within three days of the revolution of 4 September in Paris, he wrote to the "Movimento" of Genoa, "Yesterday I said to you: war to the death to Bonaparte. Today I say to you: rescue the French Republic by every means." Subsequently, Garibaldi went to France and assumed command of the Army of the Vosges, an army of volunteers. The socialist Louis Blanc referred to Garibaldi as a "soldier of revolutionary cosmopolitanism" based on his support for liberation movements through the world.