BATTLE OF VALMY
A.D. 1792
"Purpurel metuunt tyranny
Injurioso ne pede proruas
Stantem columnan: neu populus frequens
Ad arma cessantes ad arma
Concitet, Imperiumque frangat."
HORAT, Od.1.,95.
"A little fire is quickly trodden out,
Which, being suffered,
rivers cannot quench."
Shakespeare.
Valmy
A few miles distant from the little town of St. Menehould, in the northeast of France, is the village and hill
of Valmy and near the crest of that hill a simple monument points out the burial-place of the heart of a general of the French republic and a
marshal of the French empire.
The elder Kellerman (father of the distinguished officer of that name, whose cavalry charge decided the battle
of Marengo), held high commands in the French armies throughout the wars of the Convention, the Directory, the Consulate, and the
Empire.
He survived those wars, and the empire itself, dying in extreme old age in 1820. The last wish of the veteran
on his death-bed was that his heart should be deposited in the battle-field of Valmy, there to repose among the remains of his old companions in
arms, who had fallen at his side on that spot twenty-eight years before, on the memorable day when they won the primal victory of Revolutionary
France, and prevented the armies of Brunswick and the emigrant bands of Conde from marching on defenseless Paris, and destroying the immature
democracy in its cradle.
The Duke of Valmy (for Kellerman, when made one of Napoleon's military peers in 1802, took his title from this
same battlefield) had participated, during his long and active career, in the gaining of many a victory far more immediately dazzling than the
one, the remembrance of which he thus cherished. He had been present at many a scene of carnage, where blood flowed in deluges, compared with
which the libations of slaughter poured out at Valmy, would have seemed scant and insignificant.
But he rightly estimated the paramount importance of the battle with which he thus wished his appellation while
living, and his memory after his death, to be identified. The successful resistance
which the raw Carmagnole levies and the disorganized relics of the old monarchy's army then opposed to the combined hosts and chosen leaders of
Prussia, Austria, and the French refugee noblesse, determined at once and forever the belligerent character of the revolution.
The raw artisans and tradesmen, the clumsy burghers, the base mechanics, and low peasant-churls, as it had been
the fashion to term the middle and lower classes in France, found that they could face cannon balls, pull triggers, and cross bayonets without
having been drilled into military machines, and without being officered by scions of noble houses. They awoke to the consciousness of their own
instinctive soldier ship.
They at once acquired confidence in themselves and in each other; and that confidence soon grew into a spirit
of unbounded audacity and ambition. "From the cannonade of Valmy may be dated the commencement of that career of victory which carried their
armies to Vienna and the Kremlin.
"One of the gravest reflections that armies from the contemplation of too civil restlessness and military
enthusiasm which the close of the last century saw nationalized in France, is the consideration that these disturbing influences have become
perpetual. No settled system of government, that shall endure from generation to generation, that shall be proof against corruption and popular
violence seems capable of taking root among the French.
And every revolutionary movement in Paris thrills throughout the rest of the world. Even the successes which
the powers allied against France gained in 1814 and 1815, important as they were, could not annul the
affects of the preceding twenty-three years of general convulsion and war.
Valmy
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