Perched on a hill in the rolling farmlands of eastern France stands a lone windmill, or “moulin” in French, a towering structure on those low fields, so stark and out of place that a passerby can’t help but stop in curiosity.
The place is Valmy, in the Champagne region, an area that boasts the world’s most valuable grapes and some of its most blood-soaked history. Pastoral today, eastern France is a crossroads where empires clashed for centuries.
The moulin at Valmy stands as a monument to a battle that happened there in 1792 and to the idea that men should live without kings, as radical and novel a notion that humans ever have conceived, and to the discovery that ordinary people would shed blood for that privilege.
We Americans pride ourselves in overthrowing King George and launching the modern era’s first democratic government but our achievement begs some context.
At the time of the American Revolution, we were colonies of the expansive and distant British Empire which was struggling against France and Spain for control of Europe. France provided most of the gunpowder used by the American revolutionaries and officially entered the war on the side of the colonists in 1778.
Our 13 colonies were a pawn in a bigger struggle between empires led by kings — not unlike how the Vietnamese were pawns during the war between the United States and mainland China in the 1960s caught in a proxy conflict until Uncle Sam cut his losses and went home in 1975, just as King George did in 1783.
Truth be told, the British weren’t so keen on killing their own. Most colonists either were from Britain or of British descent. The British Army so hoped the colonists would come peacefully back into the fold that General Howe allowed George Washington and his troops to peacefully retreat from its defeat at the Battle of Long Island in 1776.
Howe easily could have captured Washington and his renegades and hung them. The success of the American Revolution owes considerably to luck, foreign allies, serendipity and a half-hearted “enemy.”
The French Revolution was vastly different. To depose their king, the French had to remove a resident monarch and his lords, end centuries of tradition, and upbraid the royal armies and allies, a formidable task.
French freedom-fighters also had this disadvantage: They were surrounded geographically by nations ruled by kings deathly afraid that the idea of overthrowing the king might catch on.
Rule by monarchs was deeply rooted in Europe, including by the “divine right of kings,” the idea that kings received their authority directly from God and could not be questioned by other mere mortals. By this logic, kings in England lorded over both the nation and its church.
Despite the uphill climb they faced, the French revolutionaries were making some progress by the time of the Battle of Valmy in 1792. Spurred on by the success of the Americans over King George, in three years the French abolished feudalism, created a right to vote, and broke the hold of the Catholic Church on the monarchy. Earlier in the year, they routed their king, Louis XVI.
All of that was just too much for the kings of Prussia, Austria and Britain, who allied themselves and attacked France in September to put Louis back on the throne. But the idea of losing ground or trading one king for another was so abhorrent to the French people that they showed up with pitchforks to hold off the Prussian Army at Valmy.
In an upset that shocked the world, the ragtag French forces defeated the Prussians with a combination of superior cannoneering and the zeal of volunteers who helped turn back a larger and more professional fighting force.
Previous to Valmy, European wars were fought by professional soldiers and sailors, men who fought and died for money. The idea that citizens would take up arms to fight and die for non-religious beliefs, and for ideals about how individuals might live and govern themselves, was new to Europe.
The French dubbed their revolution a struggle for “equality, brotherhood and liberty.” It caught fire.
Courage at Valmy in September 1792 inspired the French to formally abolish the monarchy a few months later. After 10 more years of revolutionary war exported from France, the supremacy of monarchies was permanently undermined. Ideas of democratic rule took hold in Europe, capital of Western Civilization.
An army of citizen volunteers, fighting for their nation’s autonomy and for human rights and freedoms, became the world’s ideal for what defines patriotism.