Battle of Valmy

20 September 1792, in Champagne

On 20 September 1792, French forces under Charles-François Dumouriez and François-Christophe Kellermann confronted the invading coalition army commanded by the Duke of Brunswick near Valmy in Champagne.

Brunswick had manoeuvred around the Argonne positions to cut Dumouriez's communications with Châlons and the road toward Paris. He ran into Kellermann's force established on the Valmy heights.

A cannonade in the mud

Fog, drizzle and muddy ground shaped the encounter. French artillery opened fire on the approaching coalition vanguard, after which the opposing batteries conducted the action principally as a cannonade — and the mud blunted the round shot by keeping cannonballs from ricocheting through packed ranks.

Kellermann had the battlefield's windmill destroyed because it gave the Prussian guns an obvious aiming point. His troops held the ridge in formation through bombardment, an ammunition-wagon explosion and limited Prussian infantry advances.

He rallied them with the cry "Vive la Nation", which the ranks repeated. A scholarly analysis treats that cry and the troops' refusal to break as the encounter's defining psychological moment.

Ten more days before the coalition left

Brunswick abandoned the attempt to take the position. The French held the field and the advance toward Paris stopped, but the coalition remained in the area for roughly ten more days before beginning its general withdrawal on 30 September.

Losses were light for the scale of the confrontation: Larousse reports about 300 French and 184 Prussian killed and wounded, from a coalition force one scholarly estimate puts at about 34,000 against about 64,000 French including reserves.

The Republic was not made on that field. The National Convention abolished the monarchy in Paris on 21 September, and Goethe's famous "new epoch" recollection was written decades afterwards.