the old regiments boasting ancient family names that often im-
plied ancient feudal power. The new regiments had a number, a
flag, and a commander elected by the soldiers.

The battle at Valmy was little more than a skirmish, sometimes
melodramatic, sometimes tragicomic. The undaunted French stood
on the Valmy hill while Kellerman continuously shouted "Long
live France!" and the Prussians suffered from diarrhea among the
vines of the Marne under the torrential rains of September. All in
all, fewer than 500 men died -- 300 French and 184 Prussians -- and
the decisive factor in the battle was the French artillery, which,
unlike the infantry, boasted cadres of the ancien régime.

From that day forward, however, the stream of history changed
direction and flowed in a new bed. This was not only because
Valmy coincided with the suppression of the monarchy and the
proclamation of the Republic, but principally because with Valmy
the wars of conquest ended and those of "liberation" began. In the
following months, the French "liberated" Savoy, Nice, Belgium,
and the Rhineland-Palatinate.

Historians speak of patriotism, of revolutionary fervor, of the
New World's irresistible, "missionary" impulse to clear the ves-
tiges of the Old World from its path. But we are still discomfited
intellectually remembering those events, like a reader who realizes
halfway through the book, that the plot has changed, together
with the characters, the writer's style, and the literary conventions
that permit us to understand the meaning of a work. With his
poetic intuition, Goethe immediately realized the novelty of the
events he was witnessing on the battlefield at Valmy, but he guard-
edly advised us only to mark the day in our memory books as a
milestone. Not even he was able to tell us why history suddenly
changed its own rules. And since the rules of Valmy are, to a great
extent, still in effect during the waning of the twentieth century,
this question demands an answer.

The "nation" that Kellerman hailed from the hill at Valmy was
an "ideological" nation; the patrie that the Assembly declared "in
danger" was a "philosophical" nation, in the sense that the term
Philosophy had acquired in French salons during the latter half of
the century. Like the American nation born twenty years earlier in
Philadelphia, the French nation was grounded not in natural ties,
though these remained important, but in intellectual bonds. The
blood flowing through the veins of the patrie was that of the Amer-
ican nation: the "rights of man" and of the citizen, popular sover-
eignty, the right to earthly happiness. Those who spontaneously

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