VALMY

An artillery shell, fired from one of the Prussian cannon atop the Heights of La Lune, roared through the air and slammed into a French ammunition cart near the windmill of Valmy at 2pm on 20 September 1792. The cart exploded into flames, sending a plume of black smoke roiling into the air. As the shells in the cart ignited, they touched off secondary explosions in two adjacent carts. Fearful of being struck by shrapnel, blue-coated French volunteers scrambled for cover.

More than 900 metres to the west, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, peered with satisfaction through his telescope at the havoc the explosions had created among the tightly packed enemy ranks. Turning to his staff, he issued orders for the Prussian infantry to deploy in two lines for an assault on the French position. Recalling how a brigade of Prussian hussars had stampeded an entire French division just a few days earlier, Brunswick believed the French commander would order a general retreat once the well-dressed Prussian infantry began its advance. With the French forced to retreat south away from Paris, the Prussian army could resume its drive on the French capital and strangle the fledgling revolution.

Three summers before, on 14 July 1789, Parisians fed up with the French monarchy’s obstruction of reforms had stormed the Bastille, the oppressive fortress of the monarch, King Louis XVI of France. It was the first outbreak of violence in what would become one of the bloodiest revolutions in modern European history. The turbulence within France compelled 6,000 officers of the French royal army to leave the country. Once outside France, the émigrés plotted with sympathetic foreign powers to stamp out the fires of revolution, flames that royal houses across Europe feared would engulf them.

Unable to bear the thought of a limited monarchy, King Louis tried to flee the country in June 1791. He had hoped to reach the Austrian Netherlands, where he would join the émigrés