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

by Tom Reiss

  It isn’t known what injury Dumas suffered during the battle, but it was not life-threatening. He spent the rest of the fall shuttling between various postings on France’s eastern frontier, both in Belgium and along the Rhine. Meanwhile, in Villers-Cotterêts, his beloved was pregnant with their second child. In January 1796, Marie-Louise wrote him:

  My good friend,

  The military post that stops here today on its way to Germany … will bring you this note which will convey our most tender wishes and which will tell you that the due date is coming soon and that I want to have you with me then. Don’t delay and bring me the courage I need. Everyone here congratulates you. Marie-Aimée [i.e., Alexandrine Aimée, their first daughter] sends you a thousand fond kisses, I add another thousand and I’m longing for you.

  Marie-Louise Dumas.

  Their second daughter, “Louise Alexandrine,” was born shortly after, and though it’s not clear if Dumas was able to attend the birth, his letters from that spring show he had more time to bounce this child on his knee than he had when Alexandrine Aimée was born, during the frenetic months of fall, 1793, just after his promotion to general’s rank. Not enough time, as fate would prove.

  THROUGHOUT 1795 the government’s pursuit of stability ran into a roadblock: the rotten state of the French economy. Three years of war had brought on hyperinflation, since the government printed ever more paper to pay for the pikes, the muskets, the modern artillery pieces. The hyperinflationary cycle had been disguised somewhat by the intensity of feelings that attended the war fever, and then the Terror, but now that France had returned to something more like normalcy, the economic crisis drove politics.§

  The current Committee members’ lack of extreme ideological convictions also made it a target for all sides, and Paris was rife with plots against the middle-of-the-road government. In spring hyperinflation and bread riots had sparked a rise in what was called “neo-Jacobinism,” and in May these far-left radicals staged an uprising; it was brutally suppressed. But the repression of the neo-Jacobins on the far left created an opening for the neo-royalists on the far right.

  On October 5, 1795, the royalist-leaning sections of the city erupted in insurrection against the central government. Thirty thousand insurgents marched on the government, which had at most six thousand troops to defend it.

  The government called on a man of influence, a provincial noble named Paul Barras—Viscount Paul de Barras—who was promoted overnight to command the Army of the Interior. Barras looked to the army and specifically to an up-and-coming general living in Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte did not disappoint him.

  Napoleon’s use of canister shrapnel shells on the crowd—the “whiff of grapeshot” in Carlyle’s famous description—revealed the sour-faced artillerist’s chilling efficiency. Hundreds of royalists lay dead in the streets of Paris, hundreds more wounded. By comparison the Champ de Mars Massacre had been a bar fight. The counterrevolutionary uprising was suppressed.

  In recognition of his services, Napoleon gained the patronage of Barras, who emerged from the crisis as France’s new strongman. The government was reorganized yet again: at the top was a five-man executive branch called the Directory, which swore itself in on November 3, 1795. The top “Director” of the French state was now Paul Barras. Among his four colleagues—plus ça change—was Lazare Carnot. There was also an oddly enormous new legislative body called the Council of Five Hundred.

  Though the so-called Directory government that ran France in the mid- to late 1790s is usually derided as a low point in the Revolution—a time of cronyism and corruption—it is rarely credited with an amazing, quiet accomplishment: this period saw the French movement for racial equality persist not only in the colonies but in Paris itself. One emblematic example was the election and acceptance of black and mixed-race legislators in the Council of Five Hundred. Belley and Mills were the first, but at least ten more would hold political office in the 1790s, including the mixed-race men Jean Littée, Joseph and Jean-Louis Boisson, Louis-François Boisrond, Jean-Baptiste Deville, Jean-François Petitniaud, Pierre Thomany, Jacques Tonnelier, and the doyen of eighteenth-century black activism, Julien Raimond. Former slaves Etienne Mentor and Jean-Louis d’Annecy also served as representatives. Annecy held the position of secretary in the Directory’s Council of Elders.

  Perhaps one of the most touching of the forgotten stories from this period was how revolutionary France, under the outwardly soulless Directory, instituted the world’s first color-blind elite secondary school. It gave the sons of former slaves—alongside the sons of privileged mixed-race and white abolitionists—one of the world’s finest educations at a time when the English-speaking world still considered it a crime for black children to learn to read.

  It began in the mid-1790s, when, at the invitation of prominent members of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, revolutionaries “of color” in the French colonies began sending their children to school in Paris. The government responded by creating an elite boarding school, the National Colonial Institute, which would be the world’s first experiment in integrated secondary education. Among its founders were leading civil rights activists like Julien Raimond, the Abbé Grégoire, and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, the man who had first ordered abolition in Saint-Domingue.

  The headmaster was a revolutionary preacher close to the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. Pupils included the children of deputies Belley, Dufay, and Thomany, Sonthonax’s own mixed-race children, and the son of Henri Christophe (the future King Henri I of Haiti). In this it mirrored the revolutionary colonial elite but did not reflect the growing political rift between blacks and mulattos in Saint-Domingue: in Paris, the children of black general Toussaint Louverture and mulatto general André Rigaud were classmates at the Institute, while in Saint-Domingue their fathers were bitter enemies in a civil war.

  The Directory passed a law mandating that “every year, in each department, for the 1st of Germinal (the Festival of Youth), six individual children will be chosen … without distinction of color, to be transported to France and looked after in special schools, at the cost of the government, during the time necessary for their education.” The Institute therefore took in not only children of the elite but also many black scholarship students.

  The minister of the interior also mandated that students be recruited from places other than the West Indies, such as Egypt and East Africa. In addition to scholarship tuition for children of black or mixed-race heritage, the government also funded some white children, especially the sons of prominent revolutionary abolitionists such as Brissot. (Interestingly, among the non-scholarship students at the school in this period were a number of openly racist planters’ sons.)

  The Institute was not merely an experiment in race mixing. It provided its black and white students with one of the most rigorous educations in the world, and the school’s best students, of whatever complexion, could take the examination for the École Polytechnique, then France’s most elite military academy. From the perspective of early 1796, Alex Dumas might well have assumed that his son, when he had one, would attend this school or a similar one. He could not have known that his son Alexandre, brilliant as he would be, would instead be unable to attend any secondary school at all, because of a man whose name was still unknown to all but a small circle in the government and the War Ministry but who would soon remake France, and the Revolution, entirely.

  In early 1796, Director Carnot opened a new front against the Austrians in Italy, and he gave the post of general-in-chief of the French Army of Italy to a talented Corsican artillery man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had recently done the government a favor. At the time, many saw it as an insult because the Army of Italy was known to be decrepit and underfunded. Napoleon knew it was an opportunity.

  * Perhaps feeling it couldn’t execute the living fast enough, the previous summer the Committee had decided to attack the dead: it ordered the systematic desecration of the royal tombs. The kings and queens of France h
ad been interred in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, since the sixth century, but in a frenzy of historical obliteration, each royal corpse was exhumed, tossed in a common grave, and covered in quicklime. A “Committee of Jewelers” seized and inventoried the jewels and precious metals found in the coffins.

  † An 1823 biographical dictionary of French generals quotes from “General Dumas’s memoir from the Vendée campaign,” which claimed that he was forced out of the position: “I wanted to discipline the army and put the principles of justice and humanity into practice on the field.… Villains, whose power was brought to an end by the anarchy [they caused], denounced me: they slandered me with the design of wanting to stop the bloodshed.” But I have never located such a memoir and this 1823 entry is the sole reference to it.

  ‡ In fact, a lively debate in the press concerned the unanswerable question of whether people died instantly upon being guillotined. Witnesses to the execution of Charlotte Corday, the prim Girondin assassin who had stabbed Marat to death in his bathtub, said they saw Corday’s severed head flush when it was slapped by the executioner. A famous surgeon published an article stating that severed heads may continue to live for some minutes and have “a perception of [their] own execution.”

  § The French economy ran on a bizarre kind of money called the assignat. Since a debt crisis had sparked the Revolution in the first place, one of the revolutionary government’s first goals had been to provide capital. It did this by nationalizing the property of the Catholic Church—monasteries, convents, churches, bishops’ tea sets, and jewelry collections—and issuing a new sort of circulating bond backed by nationalized Church property: the assignat. But the government issued more assignats whenever it felt like it, and the ensuing hyperinflation caused food riots, which increased instability, which caused the government to print more assignats, which increased hyperinflation. The paper bills had long since ceased to represent anything, except perhaps the belief in world revolution. Finally on October 19, 1795, the floor literally fell out from under the assignats: in Paris, at the printing house that manufactured them, someone simply piled too much worthless paper currency in one spot and the wood floor collapsed under the weight.

  14

  THE SIEGE

  AT the fortress city of Mantua, the moss-covered walls are still riddled with bullet holes from the battles Dumas and his comrades fought here. This was the most important siege of the Italian campaign. Here the French challenged the forces of the Austrian Empire who held northern Italy in their grip, and the ground for Italian independence was laid.

  Fifty miles north of the fortress city, where the misty hilltop plain of Rivoli guards the approaches to Lake Garda and the Alps, the French army fought its most famous battle. In a little village dotted with poplar trees, a tiny museum celebrates the revolutionary army’s most glorious campaign—the last, history would show, that it truly fought as republican brothers-in-arms. Among the endless portraits and trinkets celebrating Napoleon, I discovered a framed sheet of miniature engravings of the other French generals of the Italian campaign. Each portrait showed a general encased in a little oval frame, as if in a locket.

  The portrait of General Dumas leapt out from the rows of his lighter-skinned comrades, with their romantic pompadours and bushy sideburns. Dumas’s hair was trimmed close and neat, his head turned in three-quarter view, one eyebrow cocked high. Most of the other generals looked off to the right or left or into the distance, in a pose of destiny calling. Others presented themselves in full antique profile or looked straight at the artist with a self-satisfied air. But Dumas peered out with an open, almost quizzical expression, and I had that uncanny feeling that while the others were frozen in their lost worlds, he was alive within his little oval—impatient, curious—staring right back at me from the two-hundred-year-old paper.

  DUMAS arrived in Milan in November 1796 to join the Army of Italy. The very name the French had chosen—“the Army of Italy”—could be seen as a provocation to the various authorities who controlled the Italian peninsula. The capital of the army’s semimythical Italy was not on the peninsula at all—Rome was the capital of the Papal States—but in Paris, the beacon of light for the nascent Italian patriots.

  Many international dreamers after liberty had drifted in and out of Paris since the early 1790s—Belgians, Germans, Poles, Saint-Dominguans—but the cause of the “Italians” was among the most far-fetched. Italy had not been a united nation since the fall of Rome. Since then, Italians had experienced independence only in the form of self-governing city-states, each of which had developed its art, commerce, and political power independently. The extreme geographical separation of the north and the south, from which deep cultural, political, and economic separations followed, helped keep a unified nation from emerging.

  In the late eighteenth century, “Italy” was a concept few Italians understood or cared about. There were historical antecedents: Dante had spoken of Italy in a poetic sense and Machiavelli in a political one when he imagined a liberator to deliver his country from foreign occupation (at that point, Spain). But 250 years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Italy was more than ever under foreign domination—at the moment by the Austrian Empire.

  Formerly powerful independent cities in the north, like Florence and Milan, had become Austrian imperial cities, like Vienna or Salzburg. Resentment of the Austrians provided much of the impetus for the nascent Italian patriotism and provided a terrific opportunity for the French: the Florentines and Milanese had fewer rights than the American colonists had had and a much greater sense of their own history. The American Revolution inspired them, and the spirit of 1789 brought a new sense of cohesion and urgency.

  The French Army of Italy, under General-in-Chief Napoleon Bonaparte, burst across the western frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the most powerful Italian kingdom allied with the Austrians, in April 1796. After a series of lightning victories that caused the Sardinians to surrender and the Austrians to retreat, the French were welcomed into Milan on May 15 with revolutionary songs and adulation. Napoleon then paused the campaign, as would become his habit, and proceeded to overhaul the society and politics of northern Italy. He announced that more than a dozen ancient city-states would be incorporated into two new “independent republics”: the Cispadane Republic, south of the Po River, and the Transpadane Republic, north of it. These insta-republics amounted to a new kind of franchising of the Revolution: with this model, a “liberated” population would not need to wait more than a few days before a representative government sprang up fully formed in their capital, mimicking whatever style was then fashionable in Paris. Because this was 1796, the new Italian republics each got a version of the Directory—the fashion of republican government in Paris since the previous year—and its own French-style legal code. By July of the next year these two French-sponsored Italian republics had merged into one larger one called the Cisalpine Republic. Nobody much remembers these strange names today—but they were the political taproot of modern Italy.

  They were also the model for how Napoleon would adapt and export the French Revolution at the head of his conquering armies. He understood how to use the rhetoric and spirit of the Revolution to advance his interests. The constitution for the Cisalpine Republic shows his approach; it begins with a statement justifying the French invasion and advertising its benefits to the local people:

  The Cisalpine Republic was for many years under the domination of the Empire of Austria. The French Republic succeeded in its place by right of conquest; she renounces her claim from this day on, and the Cisalpine Republic is now free and independent.… [France] now gives to the Cisalpine people its own Constitution, which is the result of the most enlightened minds of the most enlightened nation in Europe.… No republic has existed in Italy for many years; the sacred fire of liberty had been snuffed out, and the most beautiful part of Europe lived under the foreign yoke. It is up to the Cisalpine Republic to show the world, by its wisdom, its energy
, and the good organization of its armies, that modern Italy has not degenerated, and that it is still worthy of freedom.

  Dumas was troubled by Napoleon’s approach. In Milan Dumas glimpsed the first signs that Napoleon was being treated less like a general and more like a potentate, wrapping himself in the Revolution in order to extend his own influence.

  WHEN Napoleon took command of the Army of Italy at the end of March 1796, it was the worst equipped and the most demoralized of all the French armies. Many of its forty-two thousand troops marched without shoes, not to mention boots, and dressed in rags stolen from local peasants; its officers actually wore goatskins. Morale was so low and discipline so poor that it was said its soldiers sang royalist songs and one company had renamed itself “Dauphin” in honor of the murdered King Louis’s son. The government had withheld its limited resources from the Army of Italy because it felt that the more important war with the Austrian enemy was on France’s German frontier, or in Belgium. Italy was seen as a sideshow, and also a dangerous place to launch an offensive: France had not won a major victory here in centuries. Napoleon’s strategy for reviving the Army of Italy was based on making it self-sustaining. To make an army self-sustaining is not a pretty thing.

  “Soldiers, you are badly fed and nearly naked,” Napoleon declared in March when he arrived in Nice, then the Army of Italy’s headquarters, to take its command. “I am going to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world, where you will find great cities and rich provinces; there, you will find honor, glory and riches.”

  Inspiring words, but what did they mean? “The art of making war feed on war is totally unknown to us,” the military philosopher Guibert had written, arguing that armies needed to free themselves of their lumbering supply trains by living off the land and making the enemy bear the cost. “But if a general appeared who had such a talent, would we give him the power to put it into execution?” In fact, European armies spent most of the eighteenth century weaning themselves off this style of warfare, which had decimated much of the continent the previous century, in the Thirty Years’ War. States had built up complex logistical infrastructures that could transport in vast wagon trains everything an army needed to live and fight. This was how the Austrians, the Prussians, the Piedmontese, and all the Ancien Régime armies fought. Since 1793, the French revolutionary armies had revived the old tradition of pillage in a highly organized way; it was designed to avoid inflicting extreme suffering and starvation, which could cause revolt, while maximizing the profits of war for the republican liberators. Parisian art lovers benefited from each campaign, as the Louvre galleries filled with new works from around Europe.