Born in Cahors, Gambetta is said to have inherited his vigour and eloquence from his father, a Genoese grocer who had married a Frenchwoman named Massabie.

He then worked at his father's grocery shop in Cahors, the Bazar génois ("Genoese bazaar"), and in 1857 went to study at the Faculty of Law of Paris.

He was admitted to the Conférence Molé in 1861 and wrote to his father, "It is no mere lawyers club, but a veritable political assembly with a left, a right, a center; legislative proposals are the sole subject of discussion.

[4] However, although he contributed to a Liberal review edited by Challemel-Lacour, Gambetta did not make much of an impression until, on 17 November 1868, he was selected to defend the journalist Delescluze.

In May 1869, he was elected to the Assembly, both by a district in Paris and another in Marseille, defeating Hippolyte Carnot for the former constituency and Adolphe Thiers and Ferdinand de Lesseps for the latter.

On 17 January 1870, he spoke out against naming a new Imperial Lord Privy Seal, putting him into direct conflict with the regime's de facto prime minister, Émile Ollivier.

[2] On 2 September 1870, the French Army suffered a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Sedan, in which the emperor Napoleon III surrendered and was taken prisoner.

Despite his earlier career, Gambetta voiced his opposition to the Commune in a letter to Antonin Proust, his former secretary while Minister of the Interior, in which he referred to the Commune as "les horribles aventures dans lesquelles s'engage ce qui reste de cette malheureuse France - the ghastly madness blighting what remains of our poor France".

[8] Gambetta's stance has been explained by reference to his status as a republican lawyer, who fought from the bar instead of the barricade[9] and also to his father having been a grocer in Marseille.

As a small-scale producer during the decades of the Second Industrial Revolution in France, Joseph Gambetta was nearly ruined by the competition of new chain-store food shops.

[10] This resentment may have been passed down from father to son, and manifested itself in an unwillingness to support the lower-class Communards in their usurpation of what the "petite bourgeoisie" had won a certain hegemony over.

There, he boldly proclaimed the radical republic he once supported to be "avoided like the plague" (se tenir éloignés comme de la peste) (Discours, III.5).

When Adolphe Thiers resigned in May 1873, and a Royalist, Marshal MacMahon, was placed at the head of the government, Gambetta urged his friends to a moderate course.

MacMahon, unwilling both to resign and to provoke civil war, had no choice but to dismiss his advisers and form a moderate republican ministry under the premiership of Dufaure.

Five artists, Jules Bastien-Lepage, a realist painter, Antonin Proust, defender of the vanguard who Gambetta had named Minister of Fine Arts, Léon Bonnat, an academic painter, Alexandre Falguière, who did his mortuary mask, and his personal photographer Étienne Carjat all sat at his death-bed, making five widely different representations of him which were each published by the press the following day.

Gambetta constantly urged her to marry him during this period, but she always refused, fearing to compromise his career; she remained, however, his confidante and intimate adviser in all his political plans.

On the other hand, the increased knowledge of Gambetta's attitude towards European politics which later information has supplied confirms the view that when he died, France had prematurely lost a clear thinker whom she could ill spare.

In April 1905 a monument by Dalou to his memory at Bordeaux was unveiled by President Loubet.Gambetta rendered France three inestimable services: by preserving her self-respect through the gallantry of the resistance he organized during the Franco-Prussian War, by his tact in persuading extreme partisans to accept a moderate Republic, and by his energy in overcoming the usurpation attempted by the advisers of Marshal MacMahon.

His death at forty-four cut short a career which had given promise of still greater things, for he had real statesmanship in his conceptions of the future of his country, and he had an eloquence which would have been potent in the education of his supporters.

[citation needed] Gambetta proclamation of the Republic and call for a Levée en masse left a lasting impact on Germany in the decades following.

Future Field Marshall Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz wrote in 1877: Should it come to pass that...our German fatherland suffers a defeat like that of the French at Sedan, I would wish a man emerges who knows how to inspire the sort of absolute resistance Gambetta tried to organize.In October 1918, when Germany was on the verge of defeat during the First World War, industrialist Walther Rathenau called for a German Levée en masse to reverse the deteriorating situation.

Adolf Hitler favorably contrasted Gambetta's actions with that of the post-revolutionary leaders of the Weimar Republic: With the collapse of France at Sedan, the people rose in revolution to save the fallen tricolor!

[14]A tall monument to Léon Gambetta [fr] was planned in 1884 and erected in 1888 in the central space of the Louvre Palace, now Cour Napoléon.

That initiative carried heavy political symbolism, since Gambetta was widely viewed as the founder of the Third Republic, and his outsized celebration in the middle of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion thus affirmed the final victory of republicanism over monarchism nearly a century after the French Revolution – in the same vein, the Gambetta monument visually overpowered Napoleon's comparatively diminutive Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.

[citation needed] A stone urn containing Gambetta's heart was placed in 1920 in the monumental staircase leading to the crypt of the Panthéon in Paris.