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The windmill of Valmy, the one landmark in a battle of fog and mud. The name of a shed on a ridge became shorthand for the survival of the Republic.

The Prussian army that marched on Paris in the autumn of 1792 was the most respected in Europe, and it advertised. Its commander's manifesto promised the city exemplary vengeance and total subversion if the royal family were touched, which proved to be the most counterproductive document of the century: Paris answered by storming the Tuileries, and the army that met the Prussians at Valmy on 20 September was a thing military science had no category for, half regulars, half volunteers who had been shopkeepers in July, singing while they stood. The battle itself was mostly weather and artillery. In fog and rain-mud, the French guns, the one branch of the old royal army the Revolution had kept intact and professional, traded fire with the Prussian batteries across a shallow valley by the windmill of Valmy. When the Prussian infantry began its advance, General Kellermann rode the French line, raised his hat on the point of his sword, and called out Vive la Nation; the line roared it back and did not break, and the Duke of Brunswick, looking through the rain at intact guns and unbroken shopkeepers, said the sentence that decided Europe: we do not fight here. Casualties on both sides together came to a few hundred, which by the standards of what it settled makes Valmy the cheapest decisive battle in modern history. The invasion turned around and squelched home, dysentery commanding the rearguard. In Paris the National Convention had met that same day. On the 21st it abolished the monarchy; on the 22nd, the Republic, and the calendar itself restarted at Year One. With the Prussian army that day was a 43-year-old civilian observer named Goethe, and when demoralized officers asked him at the campfire for a word, he supplied the one the era kept: from this place and this day begins a new epoch in the history of the world, and you can say that you were there. Vernet painted the mill and the mud in 1826 on commission from the duke of Orléans, who had a personal stake in the subject: as an 18-year-old lieutenant general of the Republic he had stood on that ridge himself. Four years after the canvas was delivered he became King Louis-Philippe, a monarch whose proudest credential was a battle fought to abolish monarchs, which is the Revolution's whole sense of humor in one commission. The painting hangs in the National Gallery in London, mill at the left, hat on sword at the center, and the new epoch arriving as weather.