by Tom Reiss
At the Hôtel de Ville—the city hall—on July 17, the cornered king met the new Paris municipal government and gave General Lafayette his blessing as official head of the new Paris National Guard. The king acknowledged his acceptance of the Revolution by allowing Lafayette to pin a cockade—the showy round fabric ornament by which revolutionaries recognized one another—on the royal hat. The assembled patriots cried, “Vive le roi!”*
WHILE Paris rioted, Alex Dumas and his regiment remained in their garrison, awaiting orders. He had spent the last year of the Ancien Régime, with the Sixth Dragoons, stationed in the provincial town of Laon, a hundred miles northeast of Paris, with a long view over the Picardy plain toward the French border with the Austrian Netherlands. This was one of the poorest regions of the country, and a hotbed of patriot sentiment; Picardy had sent more soldiers and junior officers to fight in the American Revolution than any other place in France.
Yet it was hard to find a more surreally calm place in the summer of 1789—less than a hundred miles from Paris but centuries removed from the events taking place there. Perched on a hill above the plain, Laon uncannily afforded views for miles from almost every spot in town. While Paris had undergone a century of remodeling, breaking down medieval walls and creating boulevards and public spaces—currently packed with revolutionary mobs—Laon remained surrounded by one big wall, with gates for horsemen to ride through to defend the towns and cities below. Since the days of the Roman Empire, Laon had protected northern Gaul from the Vandals, Alans, Huns, Burgundians, and Franks, until the Franks eventually broke through and became its new landlords. After that, for another thousand years, it had protected France. Walking around this perfectly sited fortified town today, one may picture a scene from The Lord of the Rings. A stone city on a hill—a spot of magnificent, even desolate, beauty.
On August 15, the Sixth Dragoons at last received their orders. They were to ride down to the town of Villers-Cotterêts, to defend the château of the Orléans family—princes of the blood still, though patriots—against mobs of brigands. The soldiers were also to protect the townsfolk. The order had come via the regional headquarters at Soissons but had not originated in Versailles’s war office or, indeed, with any officer of the kingdom. It came instead from a common innkeeper named Claude Labouret, who had just been elected commander of the Villers-Cotterêts National Guard.
*Initially cockades were various colors—the crowds storming the Bastille may have been wearing green ones in their hats—but this historic meeting at the city hall marked the christening of the cockade as a red, white, and blue symbol of the Revolution. Red and blue were chosen because they were the colors of the city of Paris, though they were also the colors of the House of Orléans. White was the color of the Bourbon monarchy. It is said that when the mayor first presented the cockade to the king, it was only red and blue. Then Lafayette stepped in to propose adding the Bourbon color white to acknowledge the king’s gesture of accepting the Revolution.
BOOK
TWO
8
SUMMERS OF REVOLUTION
IN the weeks that followed the taking of the Bastille, a wave of violence known as the Great Fear swept across the French countryside. Rampaging mobs attacked châteaus and burned the papers recording their feudal obligations to the local nobles. In the process, they sometimes burned down the châteaus themselves. Some rampagers made the local lord offer them a feast as he watched his belongings go up in flames.
No one has ever fully explained these events, though many later put it down to the rumors spreading of a so-called famine pact between royal bureaucrats and noble speculators to hoard goods and manipulate prices while peasant children starved to death. Tens of millions of people were living on the edge of destitution, and even in normal times a peasant family could spend nearly half its income on bread; in a year of poor harvests, a spike in bread prices could raise that figure as high as 90 percent. The compiling of local complaint petitions that spring had raised expectations of an improvement in conditions. Instead, the summer had brought only more shortages—exacerbated by commodity speculation—and no help at all from the government, which had collapsed.
On the other hand, it would seem that, like many actions in the French Revolution, there was a backstory of opportunism: many of those burning feudal records were not the genuinely destitute but rather what we would now call small business people, using a moment of public disorder to reduce their tax burden. In the last years of the Ancien Régime, clever lawyers had encouraged their noble clients to mine their records for all sorts of fees they could charge the enterprising commoners who used their land. Commoners already paid the lion’s share of national taxes and, because of these old feudal records, they now also paid a whole host of other duties to their local nobles (who, further inspiring anger, were exempt from most national taxes). Like the American Revolution before it, the French Revolution began as a tax revolt, and there were even rumors that King Louis XVI himself authorized the burning sprees because he felt the taxes on his people were unjustly high.
Social conflict was fueled by mass confusion. All across France that summer, bells tolled to warn villages and towns of approaching brigands. Such roving criminal bands had long been a problem in the countryside, terrorizing travelers, villagers, and peasants alike. But fear far outpaced the actual threat. People whispered that noblemen had organized gangs of looters to harass the commoners. Few waited for proof before taking up arms. No one could really be sure who was a brigand and who was defending against one. When villagers armed themselves and went out to confront the supposed brigands, they were in turn taken for brigands by villagers in the next town over, who then rang their bells and went out armed to meet the brigands.
The bells also rang in Villers-Cotterêts, where the innkeeper Claude Labouret was responsible for the town’s defense. Labouret was one of many locals who had prospered over the past decades by serving the needs of the Orléans family and their hangers-on. The House of Orléans had brought not only debauchery and progressive politics to the town but also a brisk aristocratic tourist trade, especially for those who liked to hunt. The Retz Forest had the best hunting in France—stag, partridge, pheasant, and wild boar—and wealthy visitors built country places in the vicinity. (There was a brief family embarrassment in the early 1780s, when “Louis the Fat,” the father of the current Duke d’Orléans, grew so obese he could no longer mount a horse to lead the hunt and had to surrender that role to the next in line to the royal throne.) Around the Orléans château a number of inns and hotels had, over the past decades, also built up a thriving trade. Some local peasants who had served in the château—even, according to local lore, gathering up unfortunate debauchers who had passed out in the gutter after a wild night—set up as independent hotelmen. Claude Labouret was among the most successful.
Since Villers-Cotterêts was on the Paris-Soissons road, the town had good sources of Parisian news by coach and, this being a progressive town in a patriot province, the residents were early in forming a National Guard unit and pinning tricolor cockades on one another. But Claude Labouret was levelheaded enough to know his ragtag militia would be no use in defending the town, with its many fine houses and hotels, not to mention the Orléans château, if a mob of brigands actually descended. He was also concerned about the town’s granaries and the food in its marketplace. And so he sent for the dragoons.
ON August 15, twenty dragoons, clad in scarlet and white, their horses draped with the queen’s blazon, rode into the main square of Villers-Cotterêts. One in particular caught everyone’s eye: the remarkable black-skinned man nearly half a head taller than the rest, with broad, powerful shoulders. Though a private, he had the bearing of an officer in the saddle, as well as the high cheekbones, imposing brow, and almost disdainful look that would have made one sure he was an aristocrat if his uniform and coloring did not say otherwise.
“He was an object of curiosity and general admiration,” a descendant of one eyewitnes
s would recall of the day Alex Dumas first rode into town.
Since there were no barracks in Villers-Cotterêts, the dragoons were billeted with the townsfolk. As the National Guard commandant, Labouret had first choice of which soldier he would host, and this was particularly convenient, since he owned a hotel. He invited the handsome black soldier who made such a favorable impression. The following night his daughter, Marie-Louise, wrote to her friend Julie Fortin:
Dear Julie—
The dragoons that we expected arrived the day before last at eleven in the morning. They were to be housed at the château and at the hunting lodge, our Lord had bidden Germain, but only the horses will be there for now and later the men, because for now, they are being generously received by one or another family in town. My father set his heart on taking in a man of color who belongs to the detachment. He is very nice. His name is Dumas. His companions say that it is not his real name.
He is said to be the son of a lord from Saint-Domingue or somewhere in those parts. He is as tall as Prevost, but he has better manners. You see, my dear and good Julie, he is a fine figure of a man.
The Labourets learned from his commanding officer that “Alexandre Dumas” was in fact Count Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (if he had claimed his inheritance, he would technically have been a marquis by this point, since Antoine had died), and though the title might be legally disputed in Paris or Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in Villers-Cotterêts it made quite an impression. Though a masterly swordsman and equestrian, as they would see, he could also enchant Marie-Louise and her parents with stories of life in Saint-Domingue and descriptions of the Parisian theater, the amazing diversions of the Palais Royal. Here was a young man with breeding, bearing, intelligence, and a life of unbounded romance and exoticism. The entire family was beguiled. As for Marie-Louise, Dumas was the most dashing man she had ever laid eyes on.
Dumas lived for four months at the Hôtel de l’Ecu with the Labourets. They spoiled him and treated him like a beloved member of the family. They would learn that, despite his aristocratic training, he was a man of deep republican convictions and believed in the Revolution fervently.* This mattered a great deal to a commander of the National Guard in the summer of 1789. Indeed, if Dumas had not had such convictions, his noble background might have been a mark against him in a France where all previous distinctions were being upended.
ON the night of August 4, the National Assembly, in an attempt to halt the fires being set on thousands of estates, declared the total abolition of feudal rights in France. Patriot aristocrats voluntarily renounced their noble privileges and took advantage of the peasant uprisings to push for social reform far beyond what any peasant could have imagined. The Viscount de Noailles, victor at Yorktown and Alex Dumas’s old neighbor in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was the first to renounce his privileges, calling for a universal income tax to accompany the end of feudal rights. The Duke de la Rochefoucauld-d’Enville, a cofounder of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks—the powerful French abolitionist society whose members included the cream of patriot nobility—rose with his fellow “friend of the Blacks,” the Marquis de Lafayette, to call for the Assembly to consider abolishing slavery before the night was through.†
French aristocrats had many reasons to voluntarily cast off their rights and privileges. In some ways the night of August 4 was the apotheosis of Enlightenment principles—a “moment of patriotic drunkenness,” as the Marquis de Ferrières put it—that allowed these nobles to put the ideals they’d been imbibing for two decades into practice at last. It was their chance to bring the most thrilling experience of their young manhood—fighting for revolution in America—home to France. In another way, though, these voluntary renunciations merely bowed to the inevitable: in practice, feudalism had long been on its way out in most parts of the kingdom. By voluntarily casting off their rights and taking on the mantle of commoners and freedmen, these nobles grabbed the reins of the Revolution and took control of its direction—for the moment.
By late August, “the representatives of the French people, formed into a National Assembly, considering ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man to be the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of Governments, [had] resolved to set forth, in a solemn Declaration, the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.” These words were written by Lafayette, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, then serving as American ambassador in Paris, and formed the preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by the National Assembly in that tumultuous month. This greatest document of the French Revolution was a conscious homage to the American Declaration of Independence. It enumerated the rights article by article:
Article 1
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.
Article 2
The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety, and Resistance to Oppression.
Other important ones included Article 6, assuring that all citizens, being equal, “shall be equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.” And Article 9 prohibited torture: “As every man is presumed innocent until he has been declared guilty, if it should be considered necessary to arrest him, any undue harshness that is not required to secure his person must be severely curbed by Law.”
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was a heady achievement, but it was followed by that year’s October Days, when a mob of furious women marched on Versailles to avenge an insult a royal officer had supposedly made against “the Nation.” Such mobs—which became emblematic of the violence of the Revolution as it broke down all conventions, even those of gender—were driven as much by bread shortages as anything else. This mob stormed through the palace, furiously shouting for Marie-Antoinette: “Where is that villain? We need her guts to make cockades! No, first we’ve got to burn her alive and fricassee her liver!” The queen fled through a secret passageway leading from the king’s chamber but ran into a locked door and, for many terrifying minutes, stood pounding on it—the king had gone to save their children—until finally some National Guard troops came to her rescue. The mob returned to Paris with huge carts full of flour and grain, along with the heads of two bodyguards on pikes—men who had been unfortunate enough to stand between them and the royals.
The National Guard forced the king and queen to accompany them back to Paris as their virtual prisoners. Thanks to some fancy intervention by General Lafayette at the head of the Paris National Guard, the royals were not murdered but rather recast—tenuously—as people’s monarchs, who would henceforth reign in the people’s capital.
The monarch-prisoners were moved into the Tuileries Palace, which had not been used as a royal residence for more than a century. Since Versailles’s construction, this palace in central Paris had been used as office space and even, occasionally, as a performance space for the Comédie-Française and other theatrical companies. Now it was revived as a setting for the monarchy, and Versailles lay abandoned, the ghost palace of the Revolution.
The National Assembly also relocated to the Tuileries, installing itself in the Manège—the cavernous indoor riding hall where Thomas-Alexandre had taken his lessons; it was the only building in Paris big enough to hold upward of a thousand deputies, along with the members of the public who would come to observe their proceedings. (Jefferson worried about the size of the body, writing in a letter to Tom Paine, “I have always been afraid their numbers might lead to confusion. Twelve hundred men in one room are too many.”) The hall’s strange, narrow design, with tiered seating on both sides, caused the deputies to divide themselves according to their political opinions: radicals to the left of the Assembly’s president, conservatives to his right, the origin
of the political terms “left” and “right.”
Days after the Manège opened for business, it received a delegation of free men of color who came to petition for the right to serve as representatives in the colonial legislature as well as the National Assembly. They had on their side the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and the principles expressed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. On the other side of the aisle, rich colonial planters created the “Club Massiac” to oppose the extension of rights to blacks, arguing that it would be “the terror of the colonists” and the ruin of France. Charles de Lameth, one Friend who also owned vast plantations on Saint-Domingue, declared that he preferred “to lose everything rather than mistake the principles that justice, humanity and eternal truth have consecrated.”
But the National Assembly was no legislature in any ordinary sense. Rather, it was a sort of meeting ground for the clubs, those odd political bodies that had sprung up during the Estates-General and for the next five years would wield the real power in France. The largest and most prominent was the Jacobin Club.
At first, the Jacobin Club was not the most radical club. It was known for its lively, collegial debates and for attracting diverse and prominent revolutionaries to its ranks. Though it would one day command the loyalty of the Paris “street,” its initial membership was largely professional and bourgeois, mainly because it charged hefty subscription fees to join. The Duke d’Orléans’s son Louis-Philippe—who in the nineteenth century would become king of France—joined; so did the Viscount de Noailles.
The Jacobins debated revolutionary issues among themselves, then took their impressive collective brainpower to the immense chamber of the Tuileries riding academy to argue them with deputies from the other clubs. Any issue—from the future of women’s rights to the conferring of vending permits—could be the subject of fiery altercation. This is what constituted French democracy in the fall of 1789—fierce, idealistic conversations about how to impose universal ideals and fairness in society. But even as the deputies were having these lofty debates, courts were adjourning, government offices were shutting down, schools were closing. Many government officials simply gave up and went home, and the parlements and other judicial organs folded, many never to reconvene. (The parlement courts were suspended and then officially abolished in 1790 as part of the introduction of an entirely new judicial system.) The right to vote was given to all “active citizens”: men over twenty-five who were French or had “become French,” whose residency had been established for at least a year, and who paid a sum worth the value of three days’ labor. Despite the vociferous objections of a few deputies, women were not considered active citizens.