The workers toiled in dangerous conditions, working unskilled jobs with brutally long hours. Hunger, malnutrition, homelessness and a lack of education were just part of the price the working class paid for industrialisation and capitalism. In the summer of 1870, Emperor Napoleon III, a posturing and rather hapless figure, declared war on Prussia. There had been diplomatic struggle over the Prussian attempt for the Spanish throne and so he marched against Bismarck with the hope of weakening France’s enemies and making territorial gains. The French empire had taken its people, already suffering from the squalor and misery brought by rapid industrialisation, into another war. It was, therefore, unpopular from the start.