War and the Second Revolution^461

The September Massacre of 1792 in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris.

ing 225 priests, perished at the hands of crowds who acted as judges, juries,

and executioners.

But just as Paris seemed vulnerable to foreign invasion, a ragtag army of

regular soldiers and sans-culottes stopped the Prussian and Austrian advance

with effective artillery barrages on September 20, 1792, near the windmill of

Valmy, near Chalons-sur-Marne. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, amazed by the victory of such ordinary people over a highly trained

professional army, wrote, “From this time and place a new epoch is begin­

ning.” An officer trained under the Old Regime called the resultant warfare

of the revolutionary armies a “hellish tactic,” which saw “fifty thousand sav­

age beasts foaming at the mouth like cannibals, hurling themselves at top

speed upon soldiers whose courage has been excited by no passion.”

The Revolution had been saved by the same people who had first made

it. Delegates to a new assembly called the National Convention were

selected by universal male suffrage in elections. The Jacobins dominated.

The delegates arrived in Paris to draft a republican constitution. Their first

act was unanimously to abolish the monarchy and proclaim the republic

on September 21, 1792, even before news of Valmy had been learned.

The revolutionary armies of proud, loyal citizen-soldiers, however badly

armed, pushed Prussian troops back across the Rhine and entered Mainz

in October. On November 6, Dumouriez defeated the Austrians at Jemappes

in the Austrian Netherlands, which was soon controlled by the French rev­

olutionary army (see Map 12.2). To supply French troops, arms manufac­

turers turned out 45,000 guns in one year, and a Parisian factory produced

30,000  pounds of gunpowder every day.