That France maintained the tradition of conscription until 1996 and still used a public discourse derived from the levée en masse is part of a wider public memory which has only recently been breached. Compared to her European neighbours, indeed, France has seemed strangely reluctant to break with her traditions, and republican politicians in particular have continued to insist, even in the twentieth century, that their legitimacy and that of the French Repub lic remained bound up in the values of their revolutionary past. The Revolution was to be celebrated, and its achievements – including the achievements of its army in saving the patrie en danger – were honoured, decade after decade, in the military processions down the Champs-Elysées every 14 July. For many the central importance of the French Revolution was self-evident; it was the event which, more than any other, had given France her distinctive character and the French people their particular form of liberty. In 1889, during the highly partisan rule of the Radicals of the Third Republic, and even, less propitiously, in 1939 as the danger of a new German invasion threatened, France celebrated the ‘Great Revolution’ unreservedly: it was seen as a single whole and commemorated as a key moment in the modernisation of the world. The citizen-armies that fought at Valmy and drove the Austrians out of the Netherlands were key components of this representation, and the identification of citizenship with soldiering remained largely unchallenged.