by Tom Reiss
Private Dumas was a showoff, and he loved doing tricks that displayed his strength and agility. His son captured these as well as anyone, since no one is bigger or stronger to a young boy than his father:
More than once he amused himself in the riding-school [manège] by passing under a beam, grabbing it with his arms, and lifting his horse between his legs. I have seen him, and I recall this with a childish amazement, carry two men on his bent leg and hop across the room with these two men on [his back]. I saw him, in a painful motion, take a medium-sized rush in his hands and break it by turning one hand to the right and the other to the left. Finally, I remember, one day leaving the little château des Fossés where we lived, my father had forgotten the key to a gate; I remember seeing him get out of the carriage, take the gate crosswise, and at the second or third shake, break the stone in which it was fixed.
Another anecdote his son tells—and which was recounted throughout the nineteenth century by many others as though it were fact—involves a trick Alex Dumas performed with a bunch of military muskets. The novelist paints it a bit like a barroom dare:
On the evening of his arrival, by the campfire light, he watched a soldier who, among other feats of strength, amused himself by putting his finger into the mouth of a heavy musket and lifting it up, not with his arm but on his extended finger.
A man wrapped in a cloak mingled among the onlookers and watched with them; then, laughing and flinging back his cloak, he said:
“That’s not bad—now bring four guns.”
He was obeyed.… He then put four of his fingers in the four gun bores and lifted the four guns with as much ease as the soldier had lifted one.
“There you are,” he said, laying them gently on the ground, “when you want to get into tests of strength, that’s how it should be done.”
When [the witness] recounted this incident to me, he still marveled at how any man’s muscles could bear such a weight.
At all times and in all places, tales of strength and power are prone to exaggeration. But no matter how much one exaggerates the feats of the strongest man in the barroom—or the barracks—he is still the strongest man, just lifting a little less weight. A French infantry musket of the period weighed at least ten pounds; it was not very likely that Alex Dumas lifted four quite like that, for it would have meant hoisting nearly forty pounds with only his fingers. The horse-lifting claim is even wilder: the dragoons’ Norman horses weighed perhaps 1,500 pounds each. Even assuming Dumas could perform “many feats which might draw an envious groan from the strongest of professional ‘strong men,’ ” it seems impossible that he actually lifted his horse by squeezing his legs around it and grabbing a beam, as he was reported to do.
This is how tales of strength were spread in a world before the Guinness Book. Private Dumas was clearly reputed to be one of the strongest men in the French army, but proof of his achievements would have to wait for real combat, real injuries, and real deaths.
Though duels were illegal in Paris, they could still be fought in the army without risking arrest. In fact, the aristocratic tradition of dueling for the “slightest offense” was maintained, and even encouraged, by the army, as a means of sharpening combat skills. This was especially true among the dragoons, who needed to be ready to grapple hand to hand with both enemy soldiers and ruthless highwaymen. Another oft-repeated story from Private Dumas’s early days as a soldier was the one about his fighting three duels against fellow soldiers in a day and winning all three, despite being gashed twice in the head. During one of them, he received a blow across the brow that may have been responsible for terrible headaches he suffered later and for problems with his vision.
It was also common among the dragoons to fight group duels with other regiments. Such practice bloodshed could start with a disparaging remark about another regiment’s skills or record, and nothing was thought better for esprit de corps than going up against rivals blade to blade. Raised on stories of these contests recounted by his father’s retired comrades, Alexandre Dumas would transpose the fights to the early 1600s to create his tales of musketeer derring-do. In the memoirs he delights in presenting them with his tongue-in-cheek bravado:
My father had hardly rejoined his regiment before an occasion for displaying his skill as a pupil of La Boëssière presented itself.
The King’s regiment and the Queen’s regiment, which had always been rivals, both happened to be stationed in the same town. This offered the perfect opportunity for staging a small war; such worthy rivals were not about to let such a chance escape.
One day a soldier of the King’s regiment passed by a soldier from the regiment of the queen.
The former stopped the latter and said, “Comrade, do you know something?”
“No,” replied the other, “but if you tell it to me I shall know it.”
“All right! The king f—the queen.”
“That’s a lie,” replied the other, “it’s the other way round, the queen f—the king.”
One insult was as grave as the other, and they could only be erased by a recourse to arms.
A hundred duels took place during the next twenty-four hours. My father fought three of them.
There is no evidence that anyone in the dragoons bothered Dumas about his unusual family history or his skin color. Records from his regiment indicate that at least two, possibly three, other “Americans” served in it at the time, though one of them was a bugler. If Dumas did get harassed about being a man of color, here he was free to defend his honor. Such duels would be only slightly more serious than the novelist’s caricature of them suggests. But they would have given Alex Dumas’s fellow soldiers a glimpse of what the tall black private might be capable of if circumstances required.
IN the summer of 1788, two years after Alexandre Dumas enlisted, France began falling apart. Although frequently at war with her neighbors, the country had enjoyed ten centuries of uninterrupted monarchy—the throne had stayed in the same family for eight hundred years—and king after king had, by monarchical standards, done a pretty decent job. For centuries, people shouted “Vive le roi!” when they meant “Vive la France!” And there was little reason to think this was bound to change. True, Louis XVI’s coronation, in 1774, had coincided with the biggest grain riots in seven years. And pairing his rumored impotence with his outsize passion for traditional pursuits like hunting, his subjects often treated the king as a figure of fun. Even so, the idea that this Louis—who, unlike some of his predecessors, showed an obviously sentimental devotion to his people and the throne—could one day lose his head must have seemed unthinkable.
But the royal finance minister had by this point discovered that France was on the verge of bankruptcy, and had presented King Louis XVI with a famously brief “to do” list:
1. The present situation
2. What to do about it?
3. How to do it?
He presented one solution: a plan for comprehensive tax reform which would remove the old privileges that largely shielded the aristocracy from taxes.
As the American Revolution had been sparked by a tax revolt, the same would now be true in France, though the many heady ideas in the air obscured the heart of the matter: France was broke.
THAT June, crowds in Grenoble pelted royal troops with red roof tiles. The troops fired back, killing three people. At the time it seemed like a disturbing trifle, a crowd temporarily carried away by antiroyalist feeling, quickly dispersed. But in fact it was the first blood of the Revolution, a year before the fact, for the sentiment that animated the Grenoble crowds would soon overtake the country.
In July, a freak storm dropped hailstones so big they killed animals and destroyed nearly all the crops around Paris. Harsh weather hit almost every region in the kingdom, dooming the harvest.
In August, a new finance minister informed the king that the treasury was officially empty. Many people blamed the empty coffers on aristocratic frivolities and on their Austrian queen. The bitter irony was th
at the financial crisis had largely been caused by French support of the American patriots; in getting back at the English, Versailles had committed not only ideological but fiscal suicide. The finance minister brought the unwelcome news that something must be done to avoid default and that that something was raising taxes. The people burned effigies of him in the streets.
In order to satisfy one of the demands of the nobles, the minister advised the king to reconvene an ancient political body known as the Estates-General. The Estates-General, a kind of class-based legislature, was almost a mythical organization, however; nobody was clear about how it worked, since it hadn’t been convened since 1614. Since then, one King Louis after another had simply ruled, albeit constantly vexed by the nobles and their parlement courts.
The Bourbon kings had fiercely resisted reconvening the Estates-General, but in this case Louis XVI finally conceded and the country breathed a sigh of relief. Slated to convene the following spring, the Estates-General would be France’s salvation, everyone was certain. That 1788 was the hundredth anniversary of England’s “Glorious Revolution” led to speculation that a Gallic version of such a bloodless shift to constitutional monarchy might be just around the corner.
Freakish weather returned in the winter of 1788–89: the Seine and other rivers froze, roads were blocked, and gristmills seized up. Bakeries baked no bread, and the penniless starved or froze to death. The remnants of the French economy ceased to function: shops were empty; Lyon’s looms stopped weaving. A broke government was powerless to help.
When spring finally arrived, a desperate euphoria greeted the prospect of the Estates-General. Preparations included not only the election of representatives but also the compilation of cahiers de doléances—“complaint books,” lists of grievances—stating all the things a local district’s people disliked about how France was run and how they wished to see them changed. Any subject of the king could complain about anything, provided he was over twenty-five and entered on the tax rolls. (Some widows tried to add their complaints, insisting that there was no explicit gender requirement.) All across the country, people gathered in improvised town-hall-style meetings to decide what to complain about. The complaints could also be about the nation’s empire, and some notebooks contained complaints about slavery and calls to end it. Educated nobles tended to dress up their complaints in philosophical rhetoric about citizenship and the nation, while members of the lower classes stuck to more down-to-earth concerns. Most complaints addressed the continuing domination of peasant life by relentless taxation, pitiful wages, and the remnants of feudalism, with its exploitation of cheap labor.
This public venting stoked participation in politics. It got ordinary people involved in government and made them hopeful—too hopeful—that once these complaints reached the king, he could make everything all right.
In a working-class district of Paris in April, one meeting caused a riot. A local wallpaper manufacturer’s remark started rumors that he—along with other bosses—was trying to use the occasion to cut workers’ wages. In fact, this manufacturer, who barely escaped with his life, was a proponent of workers’ rights whose remark had been misunderstood. The French Guards, responsible for the city’s policing, rode in to disperse the rioters. In their blue coats, red collars, and white breeches, they sported the colors that would be adopted by the Revolution but were in fact their age-old livery at Versailles, where they performed palace security along with the Swiss Guards, the mercenaries of European kings and the pope. The French Guards were elite troops, and, though recruited from all over France, they lived in Paris among the population. The king depended on them to restore order when crisis threatened. On that afternoon, they did not let him down. The French Guards fired into the crowd, ending the riot and killing at least twenty-five people.
A week later, on May 5, 1789, the delegations to the Estates-General gathered before the king at Versailles. The seat of the monarchy was transformed into a vast political carnival. Delegates came from every town and region in France, bearing the complaint notebooks of their local constituents, and as they met and mingled in the shadow of the legendary palace, they naturally split into smaller groups to eat, drink, and argue about what was to be done. A cluster of Breton deputies formed one little chat group that, once the carnival moved on to Paris and the Palais Royal, would become known as the Jacobin Club.
Before any representative governing could begin, a battle had to be fought over how voting would work. The Estates-General got its name from the traditional division of France into three “estates”: clergy, nobility, and commoners. The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of “deputies” to represent it. This meant that the clergy and the nobility together could outvote anything that the rest, collectively known as “the Third Estate,” wanted; the idea of proportional representation—or any meaningful voice for the people—was a sham.
The energized and emboldened delegates of the Third Estate, the “99 percent”—in reality, closer to 96 percent—of the French population who paid the bulk of the taxes, demanded that its number of representatives be doubled so that commoners’ votes would equal the combined votes of nobles and clergy. In other words, the Third Estate was still demanding only half of the total political power. After weeks, the king was convinced to allow the doubling of the Third. But by this point a group of radical delegates had convinced a majority of commoners and liberal nobles that the entire archaic structure of the Estates-General should simply be thrown out and replaced by a national assembly in which there would be no estates and everyone would have an equal vote. This meant that the 96 percent who were neither clergy nor noble would dominate.
On Wednesday, June 17, 1789, France went from a system where only the nobility and the church had power to a system where, at least theoretically, the common people did. Europe’s most renowned absolute monarchy was suddenly the widest system of suffrage in the world. But on Saturday morning, the deputies arrived at the hall of their new National Assembly to find that royal troops had blocked the gates and put up notices telling the deputies to return the next week for a special “royal session,” at which Louis planned to inform them personally that their actions were illegal and invalid. But instead of dispersing, the infuriated deputies marched to a nearby indoor tennis court, where they swore an oath not to leave until France had a constitution. Frenchmen were finally taking the “extreme measures” of which Lafayette had not believed them capable.
The king ordered garrisons around Paris to be reinforced in case force was needed. As against a Parisian population of 650,000, the Swiss and French Guard regiments at the king’s immediate disposal totaled fewer than ten thousand men. In ordinary circumstances, Dumas’s unit, the Queen’s Dragoons, might have been among those called to Paris. But in a crucial sign of the way things were going, a full third of the twenty thousand reinforcements summoned by the king were foreign mercenaries. The king’s ministers feared that French soldiers might at this point be too easily turned to the patriot cause. Activists had been arrested for giving out pamphlets that read, “We are Citizens before Soldiers, Frenchmen before slaves.” When news of the king’s calling in foreign troops reached the Palais Royal, its arcades exploded. “The ferment at Paris is beyond conception,” an observer reported. “Ten thousand people have been all this day in the Palais Royal … the people seem, with a sort of phrenzy, to reject all idea of compromise.”
As if nature again were conspiring to foment revolution, northern France now ran out of grain completely. Bread riots swept from Normandy to Picardy and threatened Paris, too. Rumors grew that royals and aristocrats were in league to starve the patriots before attacking them with foreign troops.
Spurred on by such rumors, the crowds in the Palais Royal rushed to arm themselves, and suddenly all of Paris was on the move. On the night of July 12 and throughout the next day, people broke into shops and houses, grabbing every gun, sword, pike, dagger, and kitchen
knife. They also raided bakeries, in a desperate search for scraps of bread. The mob secured thirty thousand Charleville muskets from the Invalides armory, but the government had prudently removed both shot and powder to the Bastille, the prison-fortress in the heart of Paris. By 1789, it housed only a handful of prisoners and was actually slated for demolition (its most prominent prisoner, the Marquis de Sade, had just been moved). For most people, though, it remained a hated symbol of oppression. On Tuesday, July 14, crowds stormed the Bastille and, after negotiating the prison governor’s good-faith surrender, stabbed him to death, shooting the corpse for good measure and parading its severed head around the city streets on a pike.
The day would become France’s version of July Fourth, though Bastille Day commemorates a far bloodier, more contested event than the signing of a Declaration of Independence.
One fundamental development that made the storming of the Bastille—and indeed the entire Revolution—possible was, with a mysterious alchemy, the advance revolutionizing of the French military. Three months earlier, in that first riot, the French Guards had followed orders and fired on the rioters. Yet on July 14, instead of doing their job and defending the Bastille, the French Guards joined the rioters, and would soon declare themselves the National Guard. The war minister informed the king that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of any French soldier or junior officer. Without its army, the royal government collapsed.