The true reason that Tourcoing is so little known in this country is to be discovered in that other historical fact attaching to the battle, which I have mentioned. It occupied but a confused and an uncertain place in the general history of Europe; though perhaps, were its military significance fully understood, it would stand out in sharper relief. For though the Battle of Tourcoing was not the beginning of any great military series, nor the end of one; though no very striking immediate political consequence followed upon it, yet it was Tourcoing which made Fleurus possible, and it was Fleurus that opened the victorious advancing march of the French which, looked at as a whole, proceeded triumphantly thenceforward for nearly eighteen years and achieved the transformation of European society. What, then, was the political circumstance under which this action was fought? The French Revolution, by the novelty of its doctrines, by the fierceness and rapidity of its action, and by that military character in it which was instinctively divined upon the part of its opponents, challenged, shortly after its inception, the armed interference of those ancient traditional governments, external to and neighbouring upon French territory, which felt themselves threatened by the rapid advance of democracy. With the steps that led from the first peril of conflict to its actual outbreak, we are not concerned. That outbreak took place in April 1792, almost exactly three years after the meeting of the first Revolutionary Parliament in Versailles.