Talk:Battle of Valmy

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napoleon was involved too

Seems highly unlikely. According to the brief summary of his early career in Chandler's "Campaigns of Napoleon" he spent the first half of September 1792 in Paris,arranging to be promoted to/ confirmed as both regular captain of artillery and lieutenant colonel of volunteers (his basic problem being that as a regular captain he should have been with his regiment at Valence, but his lieutenant colonelcy of volunteers was with the Ajaccio volunteers in Corsica). Chandler says he left Paris on Sept 17 heading for Corsica, which he reached in mid-October. If he had been at Valmy, I think he would not have hidden the fact later on in his career (and he would seem to have already had enough on his plate trying to be in 2 places at once)

Carlyle says Louis Phillipe was present as a serving officer on the French side (he certainly was serving under Dumouriez at the time, and was present at the Battle of Jemappes in November 1792)

Goethe was present and wrote a book on 'The Campaign in France' By his own account, when asked by some of Brunswick's soldiers after the battle what he thought it all meant he replied

"From this place and this time commences a new era in world history and you can all say that you were present at its birth"

Possibly the actual battle was superfluous ; Dumouriez had already won the campaign in the sense that disease and mud had put Brunswick into an untenable position. Short of the French army coming over to Brunswick en masse, or otherwise melting away, he would probably have had to retreat any way. But Valmy made sure of that; it also showed that faced with foreigners attempting to restore their King the French were more interested in repelling the invaders than in restoring the monarchy.

Could someone elaborate on why this is a turning point in the histroy of the world?

[edit] Intro: The Battle of __ was a battle

Instead of going back and forth on the intro, I thought I would just post comments. Basically, I think it is silly to have intro statements that basically say The Battle of X was a battle near X.. I suspect that most readers will realize that something named the Battle of X was in fact a military engagement, (although some explanation may be required when introducing the Battle of the Sexes or the Battle of the Network Stars. I think the current version says that the battle was an engagement, but I suspect that most readers already suspected that.

If you want to say that The BoV was imortant just say that. If you want to say that The BoV saved the French Revolution then say that. You don't have to add unnecessary redundancy to say the BoV was an important battle or the BoV was the battle that saved the French Revolution. And none of this is changed by saying that a battle is an engagement, or a conflict, or a melee, or a clash, although with less than 1000 casualties it might be more correct to say that The BoV was an indecisive skermish. The Gomm 01:34, 30 December 2006 (UTC)