The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

by Tom Reiss

  As was the revolutionary custom, Villers-Cotterêts’ Church of Saint-Nicolas had been desacralized. Its cross was swapped out for a weather vane in the shape of a cockerel, the French national symbol, and the nave was now being used for meetings of the local Jacobin Club.

  The couple were married in a civil ceremony at the town hall on November 28. It is not clear if they eventually had a Catholic ceremony—if so, it would have been for the benefit of Marie-Louise, since Lieutenant Colonel Dumas had no faith besides republicanism. (Ten years later, when their son Alexandre Dumas was born, the church had been resacralized, and the future author was duly baptized there.)

  The ceremony was witnessed by two of Dumas’s old comrades from the dragoons, including “Citizen Louis Augustin Brigitte Espagne, lieutenant colonel of the 7th Hussars Regiment,” who would go on to serve under Dumas (and eventually rise to become “Count of the Empire” under Napoleon). But the most interesting witness was Marie Retou, “widow of the late Antoine Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, residing in St.-Germain-en-Laye.” Her presence implied an attempt by Dumas at reconciliation with his past and his father’s memory, not to mention with his stepmother herself.‖

  The marriage contract details the financial conditions of the marriage—neither spouse assumed any debts incurred by the other prior to the union, and, in the event that either died, “The one person remaining of the two will take from their part of the contract and before dividing the assets, as far as personal property is concerned, clothes and linen for his/her own use and a fully furnished bedroom with decoration at his/her discretion, moreover if the bride survives she will take her jewelry and rings, as for the groom he will take his horse, weapons and luggage.”

  The honeymoon was brief and involved no exotic travel—but it left Alexandre Dumas and Marie-Louise expecting their first child.

  WHILE Dumas was getting married, the National Convention had been debating what to do with the former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called “Louis Capet”—a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987. The Convention put Louis Capet on trial. Representative Philippe Égalité voted with the slim majority to send his cousin to the guillotine, though he himself would follow before the year was out. On January 21, 1793, Louis Capet was decapitated.

  Lieutenant Colonel Dumas, having meanwhile returned to his post following his honeymoon, may have felt that the Revolution had sent him back in time: on January 11, the Free Legion of Americans was stationed at Laon, the dragoons’ old garrison town.

  There were about two hundred free men of color and former slaves in the Black Legion, including a number of junior officers older than Dumas who had last fought with colonial regiments in Saint-Domingue or the other sugar islands. It was Dumas’s job to train them all, lead patrols, and, as his plentiful correspondence with Paris shows, fight for weapons, rations, uniforms, and horses. There was also the matter of their pay, which now seemed to have slipped the government’s mind.

  Dumas may have soon wished that he’d taken the offer to join Boyer’s Hussars of Liberty and Equality instead of Saint-Georges’s legion. He was left to command the legion largely by himself, for Colonel Saint-Georges and the legion’s other senior officers often went on “recruiting missions” to Paris—where it seems likely that they spent their time drinking and carousing. While Saint-Georges had seemed filled with genuine zeal about the legion’s creation, a socialite whose hardest riding had been in the Tuileries Gardens did not transform easily into a soldier.

  In February 1793 the government ordered the legion to defend the Belgian frontier a hundred-odd kilometers north of Maulde. Despite France’s early victories, it was still a war of frontier raids. Dumas knew this kind of fighting well, and he led the Americans to a succession of victories. His son the novelist offers a colorful description:

  As the head of the regiment, my father saw a vaster field open for his courage and intelligence.… Once, for example, [the American legion] was in the vanguard when it suddenly stumbled upon a Dutch regiment hidden in the rye, which at that season and in that country grew as high as a man. The regiment’s presence was given away by the movement of a sergeant who was barely fifteen paces from my father and raising his gun to fire. My father saw this movement, understood that at such a distance the sergeant could not miss, drew a pistol from his holster, and pulled the trigger with such rapidity and luck that before the [sergeant’s] weapon was leveled its barrel was pierced clean through by the pistol bullet.

  This pistol shot was the signal for a magnificent charge, in which the Dutch regiment was cut to pieces.

  My father picked up the bullet-pierced rifle from the battlefield. It was held together by two scraps of iron. I had it for a long time in my possession, but in the end it was stolen during a move.

  The pistols which had wrought this miracle of precision had been given by my mother, and came from the workshops of Lepage. Later, they acquired a certain celebrity in the Army of Italy.

  An encyclopedia entry from the 1820s, written decades before the novelist’s account, provides a more sober confirmation of Alex Dumas’s heroism with the Black Legion:

  [Dumas] led his young warriors into action every day. Constantly sent to the outposts, [Dumas] distinguished himself in particular at Mouvian, near Lille, where, at the head of a patrol of 14 men, he swooped down on the post of 40 Dutch soldiers, killing three by his own hand, taking 16 prisoners and dispersing the rest.

  Though Saint-Georges was frequently absent, when he was around he continued to carry out his duties, and his conduct in April 1793 showed that he was still devoted to the Revolution: that month, the army’s commander-in-chief, General Dumouriez, attempted a coup d’état. Saint-Georges and Dumas refused an offer to join it, and instead rallied the Americans and another legion to defend the city of Lille from the pro-coup forces.

  But the Black Legion was dogged by problems. Neither the officers nor the men had received their pay, and some of the men lacked boots. Lieutenant Colonel Dumas even had trouble finding them weapons. His letters show he was becoming exasperated with the situation.

  Then, in June, Saint-Georges disappeared again—some reports said to Paris, some to Lille—and when he surfaced, the Ministry of War accused him of running a horse-trading scheme. The charge was that he had purchased good horses with government money, sold them at a profit, and then bought cheap mounts to give his soldiers. According to the novelist Dumas, seconded by many other writers, when Saint-Georges was summoned to Paris to explain himself, he put the blame on his second in command:

  As Saint-Georges’s books were very badly kept, he hit on the idea of throwing the blame upon my father by saying that it was Lieutenant Colonel Dumas who had been charged with the regimental mounts.

  The minister of war therefore wrote to my father, who immediately proved that he had never ordered a single requisition, nor bought or sold a single horse.

  The minister’s response entirely cleared my father. But he didn’t give up his grudge against Saint-Georges, and … he resolved to fight a duel with his former colonel.

  The novelist Dumas has a great deal of fun with the grudge between the two old comrades in arms, the former teacher and his pupil, ending it with a scene where Saint-Georges comes to call on Dumas after the latter had challenged him multiple times to a duel. “Saint-Georges, brave though he was with pistol or sword in hand, much preferred to choose his duels,” the novelist comments, then paints the scene as occurring when his father was sick at home in bed, recovering from an operation, being nursed by his old adjunct Dermoncourt:

  [O]n being told of the indisposition that kept him in bed, [Saint-Georges] was about to leave his card and withdraw, when Dermoncourt, who had heard much about him, seeing an admirably handsome mulatto who stuttered while speaking, recognized Saint-Georges, and, running after him:

  “Ah! Monsieur de Saint-Georges,” he said, “it’s you! Do not leave, I beg y
ou; for, ill as he is, the general is quite capable of running after you, so eager is he to see you.”

  Saint-Georges at once made up his mind what would be best.

  “Oh! dear Dumas!” he cried, “I certainly believe that he wants to see me; and so do I! We were always such good friends. Where is he? Where is he?”

  And, darting into the room, he flung himself upon the bed, took my father in his arms, and embraced him almost to the point of suffocation.

  My father wanted to speak, but Saint-Georges did not give him time.

  “Ah,” he said, “but you wanted to kill me? To kill me—me? Dumas, kill Saint-Georges? Is it possible? But aren’t you my own son? When Saint-Georges is dead, could any other man replace him? Come on, get up! Order me a chop, and let there be no more question of all this foolishness.”

  My father was strongly inclined to pursue the affair to the very end; but what is there to say to a man who throws himself on your bed, who embraces you, who calls you his son, and who demands some lunch?

  This is what my father did; he held out his hand and said:

  “Ah! you brigand, you are surely happy that I am your successor, as you say, and not that of the last minister of war; for I give you my word that I would have you hang.”

  “Oh! you would guillotine me at least,” said Saint-Georges, forcing a laugh.

  “Not at all, not at all. Honest people are guillotined these days; but thieves are hanged.”

  In the memoirs the incident ends with the two friends trading a few more threats and then being interrupted by lunch. In fact, there is no record of any letters showing that Saint-Georges tried to place the blame on Dumas, or that Dumas was ever questioned by the war minister about the horse-trading scheme. On the contrary, when the Black Legion was disbanded, he received neither a reprimand nor a summons to trial. Instead, on July 30, 1793, Alex Dumas received a letter signed by the minister of war informing him that he had been promoted to the rank of brigadier general of the Army of the North.

  * Lafayette was arrested by the Prussians, and when he protested that he had left the French army and was traveling on his honorary American citizenship, the “hero of two worlds” was thrown into irons. Lafayette spent the next five years as a common prisoner in a series of Prussian and Austrian fortresses. General Washington wanted to intervene on his behalf, but the monarchist states of Prussia and Austria did not recognize the revolutionary United States—any more than they recognized the revolutionary government of France—so Washington was powerless to help his friend.

  † On the eve of World War I, over a century later, French leaders would still be invoking this battle, in the hope, ultimately false, that the French would always beat back the Germans.

  ‡ The English legion was created by the poet John Oswald, a Scots officer in the British army who’d developed a militant form of Jacobin vegetarianism, tinged with Hinduism, while stationed on the Malabar Coast of India. He pioneered the cause of vegetarianism in the West with his book The Cry of Nature before dying in a battle against royalists in western France in 1793.

  § Among the most ubiquitous changes imposed in the first days of the French Republic was the use of the words “Citizen” and “Citizeness” to replace all previous titles, including the most basic “Monsieur” and “Madame.” The National Convention “will not suffer the title of ‘Monsieur’ in its midst; we will substitute that of ‘Citizen,’ ” fumed an article from Brissot’s French Patriot newspaper in the fall of 1792. “Citizen is a sacred word.” The text goes on to explain that the ultimate revolutionary goal should be to emulate the Romans, who did not use any honorifics at all, not even the sacred word “citizen.”

  ‖ Mademoiselle Retou, now Madame de la Pailleterie, would keep up cordial relations with the Dumas household, but practically the only mention I ever found of her by Alex Dumas was in a letter he wrote home from the front to Marie-Louise in 1796, when they were having grave money troubles after the birth of their second daughter, in which Dumas cursed the old inheritance fiascos in his family: “I would not have believed my father unnatural to such an extent; I had not done him … anything so ridiculous … I have just written to Madame de la Pailleterie to discover in whose hands lies my uncle’s fortune.” It is impossible to decipher the details of the inheritance squabbles at that point, but the letter mainly complains about other people, such as Antoine’s lawyer, making only that passing reference to “Madame de la Pailleterie.”

  11

  “MR. HUMANITY”

  IN the space of a year, Alex Dumas had gone from lowly dragoon corporal to one of the army’s highest ranks. A month after his appointment as brigadier general, he was promoted to general of division. He now had not a hundred or even a thousand men under his command, but ten thousand.

  Revolutionary opportunities came with revolutionary risks: it took a special sort of courage to accept a general officer’s commission in the summer of 1793. While Dumas had been serving with the Free Legion of Americans, a profound change had occurred. In addition to the possibility of murderously insubordinate troops, a French general now had to worry still more about the danger of being murdered by his political masters, who controlled every aspect of military affairs.

  That spring France’s official foreign-enemies list had mushroomed: Spain, Portugal, Naples, Holland, Great Britain. The government had taken every reversal on the battlefield as an excuse to arrest and purge more internal counterrevolutionaries, finding them especially in the officer corps. The truth was that revolutionary France had simply attacked or antagonized too many countries. A decade earlier, the American revolutionaries had been supported by nearly all of Europe in their war; now the French revolutionaries were in the opposite situation. They faced a devastating combination of Britain’s grip on the seas, and on the land the might of the Austro-Germanic forces. Saint-Domingue and the other French sugar colonies were raided, and their ships looted, along with French ships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. In Paris, hyperinflation—the price of bread reached half a million francs—sparked riots. The Austrians surged back into Belgium and once again threatened France’s northeastern frontier. And Dumouriez attempted his coup d’état.

  It was this last event, in April 1793, that provided the excuse for forming within the government a new, elite body with an ominously innocuous-sounding name: “the Committee of Public Safety.” This panel of nine deputies set out ostensibly to protect the Revolution from subversion, foreign and domestic, and to bring ruthless order to the chaos of revolutionary politics. Soon they would begin sending their own members to the guillotine, along with civilian counterrevolutionaries, aristocrats, priests, and sundry other enemies of the people. But the Committee’s original and ongoing mission was to ensure the military’s—particularly military officers’—loyalty to the Revolution. To this end, civilian “commissioners” were sent out to every army and division to monitor the generals and exercise the government’s new control over the war effort.

  The Committee member in charge of this task was Louis de Saint-Just. The son of an army officer, and only twenty-four, Saint-Just soon earned the nickname “the Archangel of Terror”: his specialty was threatening officers at the front with the guillotine if they did not deliver victory, and he was known to have officers executed in front of their troops as an example, “to encourage the others.” Before he went to the guillotine himself in July of 1794, scores of generals would be murdered by his commissioners for disappointing expectations. “You no longer have any reason for restraint against enemies of the new order,” Saint-Just said, elucidating his theory of applied terror. “You must punish not only traitors but the apathetic as well; you must punish whoever is passive in the Republic.” (Dumas would have run-ins with the commissioners, though luckily he did not run into Saint-Just.)

  Along with the Archangel of Terror, the Committee’s other and more senior military mastermind was the brilliant engineer Lazare Carnot, called “the Organizer of Victory.” Carnot was one of two t
echies on the Committee of Public Safety. He had published important papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

  Carnot had determined that in order to counter the vast coalition against it, France needed to capitalize on its manpower edge over its rivals, to exploit its surplus of young, able-bodied men. Last year’s strategy of volunteers riding around from one front to another, looking for glory, must be replaced by massive, centrally directed columns hurtling themselves at the enemy in a vast patriotic carnage of blood and sacrifice. Nothing less would do. To this end, Carnot instituted an innovation that would transform the history of war: the levée en masse—the first military draft in modern history.

  In under a year, from February 1793 to December 1793, Carnot’s draft increased France’s troop strength from 178,000 to approximately one million men. France would field fifteen separate armies, totaling 800,000 active-duty soldiers, to defend or expand every possible inch of its frontiers.

  In order to arm such a mass of conscripts, Carnot brought back an old weapon: the pike. The last time pikes had been issued to French soldiers was in 1703. But they were the iconic French revolutionary weapon. As early as the battle of Valmy, Carnot had incited the Assembly to distribute pikes to every soldier and citizen in the land, and ordered local blacksmiths to drop all other tasks to make more of the long thrusting spears. “The pike,” declared Carnot, “is the arm of liberty.”

  His colleague Brissot had gone even farther: “Pikes began the revolution, pikes will finish it,” he intoned—before falling to the Revolution’s other iconic edged weapon, the guillotine.