Battle of Valmy, 1792: the cannonade that saved the French Republic

The morning fog had lifted, and the guns of two armies were firing at each other across wet Champagne farmland; Chuquet puts the Prussian batteries at the inn of La Lune about 2,500 meters from the mill of Valmy. Among the Prussians, traveling with the Duke of Weimar, was the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and that evening, as the stunned Prussians sat in the rain around a camp that could not even light a fire, he told them that from this place and this day a new era of world history had begun.²

Background: a revolution at war

France's neighbors had watched the Revolution with growing alarm. Austria and Prussia concluded an alliance on 7 February 1792, though it was France, Chuquet notes, that declared war, on 20 April. An early French advance into the Austrian Netherlands ended in panic: near Mons and Quiévrain the troops fled toward Valenciennes, crying that they had been betrayed.³

The French army was in poor shape: Chuquet reckons that of 9,000 officers of the line army nearly 6,000 had left their posts. On 25 July the allied commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto threatening, if the royal family were harmed, to deliver Paris “à une exécution militaire et à une subversion totale” (“to military execution and total overthrow”, our translation). The Prussians entered France on 19 August, Chuquet writes; Longwy capitulated on 23 August and Verdun on 2 September. Meanwhile in Paris the monarchy had fallen on 10 August. In the allied camp, Goethe recalled, the quick surrender of Longwy seemed to confirm the émigrés' promise that the invaders would be welcomed everywhere with open arms.⁴

Armies and commanders

The allied commander was Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick. King Frederick William II of Prussia was with the army, and at the decisive moment, Jomini writes, it was the king who overrode his general and ordered the army forward. Chuquet counts about 34,000 Prussians at Valmy.⁵

Two French armies stood in their way. In August Charles François Dumouriez received command of the Army of the North, while François Christophe Kellermann led the Army of the Centre from Metz toward the Argonne. Chuquet counts 52,000 French, of whom 36,000 were put in line. He credits the outcome at Valmy to the generals' dispositions, the vigorous fire of the artillery and the firmness of the line troops, with the volunteers of 1791 serving among them; Lombard, secretary to the King of Prussia, wrote that the French generals had under their orders all that remained of France's line troops.⁶

Both French generals were veterans of the old army. Kellermann, born in Alsace in 1735, had joined the army at fifteen and fought in the Seven Years' War. Dumouriez had been minister of foreign affairs in the spring of 1792 before he left the ministry to serve with the Army of the North, and after the fall of the monarchy he took over the army of Lafayette, who crossed the frontier on 19 August and was arrested at the Austrian outposts.⁷

The battle in phases

The Argonne and the turned flank

Dumouriez first tried to hold the passes of the Argonne Forest, the wooded ridge between Verdun and Sainte-Menehould. Chuquet writes that he boasted that the Islettes and Grandpré were the Thermopylae of France, and Goethe, on the other side, saw a second Thermopylae planted in the allies' way. But Dumouriez had stripped the pass of La Croix-aux-Bois to about a hundred men, the Austrians took it, and his line was turned. He fell back to Sainte-Menehould, resolved to hold on there even if the allies got behind him, and on 19 September Kellermann joined him.⁸

The result was a strange battlefield. The Prussians, who had marched round the French, faced back the way they had come with Paris behind them, while the French faced west, between the invaders and their homeland. Goethe noted the oddity: halted near a signpost on the road to Paris, the Prussians had the capital in their rear, while the French army stood between them and home. Brunswick wanted to reopen his communications through the Argonne, but the King of Prussia, believing the French were retreating to Châlons, ordered the army forward to cut them off, Jomini writes.⁹

The cannonade

On the morning of 20 September the fog was so thick, Jomini writes, that nothing could be seen at twenty-five paces. The Prussian advance guard ran into Kellermann's outposts, and Kellermann massed his army on the hill of the windmill of Valmy, with his command post by the mill, while the advance guard of Dumouriez's army under Stengel held the neighboring Mont d'Yvron. Around noon, as the fog lifted, the main Prussian army was in position and the cannonade grew.¹⁰

The Prussians expected the French to give way after a few volleys. About one o'clock, Chuquet writes, the King ordered the attack, and the infantry advanced in fine order. Kellermann formed his troops in columns, told them to hold their fire and charge with the bayonet, raised his hat on his sword and cried “Vive la nation!”, and the cry ran along the whole line. Under the French guns the Prussian infantry had covered barely two hundred paces when Brunswick, convinced that the attack would be costly and useless, halted it.¹¹

Turning point

Towards two o'clock, in Chuquet's account, a shell from La Lune blew up three ammunition wagons near the mill; Jomini places the explosions at eleven, and Goethe, on the Prussian side, recorded a powder wagon exploding at Kellermann's post by the mill. The first French line fell back and the drivers of the artillery train fled, but Kellermann re-formed the line, and the cannonade resumed with greater force. Brunswick, seeing the French firm again, held a council of war by the inn of La Lune and, Chuquet writes, spoke the decisive words “Hier schlagen wir nicht” (“we do not fight here”, our translation); the King gave way, and the cannonade died away between five and six. Goethe describes the scene that evening: the French stood immovable, the Prussians had been withdrawn from the fire, and it was exactly as if nothing had happened, except that the whole army was in consternation.¹²

Aftermath

Neither side lost heavily. Chuquet puts the French loss at nearly 300 and the Prussian at 184 men out of action, adding that most of the Prussian wounded died for want of care in the following days; Jomini puts the loss on both sides at no more than 800 men. Talks began at the outposts on 22 September, Jomini writes, and came to nothing; on 30 September the allies began to retreat, and by 21 October all their forces were back behind Longwy. In his view the French had preferred a certain half-success to a doubtful victory and built the enemy “un pont d'or” (“a golden bridge”, our translation).¹³

On 21 September, the day after the battle, the new National Convention abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Republic, and the mill of Valmy came to stand, in the words of a French deputy in 2002, for the victory of the French people's army and the birth of the First Republic. Freed from the invasion, Dumouriez marched into the Austrian Netherlands and won at Jemappes in November, as Jomini relates.¹⁴ › 20 September in military history

Legacy and memory

Chuquet writes that only when the Prussians withdrew did the French understand that “cette affaire”, as they called it, had been the salvation of France: without inflicting a notable defeat on the allies, it had crushed their pride, stopped their advance and convinced them that their enterprise would fail. Goethe's remark that evening gave the battle its place in memory.¹⁵

Kellermann paid for his fame. Suspected of treason during the Terror, he spent thirteen months in prison before he was restored to his rank; under Napoleon he became a marshal in 1804 and, in 1808, Duke of Valmy. In his will he asked for a simple monument on the field of Valmy where his heart would lie among the men who had died there, under an inscription saying that here the brave who saved France on 20 September 1792 had died gloriously. When he died in 1820 his heart was laid at Valmy, in a monument raised in 1821 on the site of the mill. For the centenary in 1892 a statue of the general some 12 meters high was added.¹⁶

Visiting the battlefield today

The mill itself has had a troubled life. The original was destroyed in the battle; a mill brought from Attiches in northern France was set up on the hill on the eve of World War II, and inaugurated in 1947, only to be wrecked by the great storm of 26 December 1999. A new mill modeled on the original now stands in its place, and the Centre historique Valmy 1792 in the village tells the story of the battle with multimedia exhibits and guided visits to the mill.¹⁷