After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Gounod moved with his family from their home in Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, first to the countryside near Dieppe and then to England. The house in Saint-Cloud was wrecked by the advancing Prussians in the build-up to the Siege of Paris. To earn a living in London, Gounod wrote music for a British publisher; in Victorian Britain there was a great demand for religious and quasi-religious drawing room ballads, and he was happy to provide them.