by Tom Reiss
But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level. He began by raising his soldiers’ back pay with a freedom fee imposed on the city of Milan—the price for its independence from Austria—to the tune of 20 million francs in cash. He followed this with liberation levies on every state, city, and principality the army invaded. The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris. The army also took precious manuscripts, books, and scientific instruments. Napoleon charged every local duke a ransom in artwork for an armistice, and the ransom was five times the usual rate for the pope, who had the best collections of anybody. In small towns that could not supply artwork, jewels, cash, or gold, the requisitions came in the form of sacks of flour or rations of meat and casks of wine.
From bare subsistence the soldiers of the Army of Italy suddenly began to live like kings; where they were hungry, they now commandeered thousands of steaks and bottles of wine from their liberated hosts. The hard-bitten bunch had more cash than it knew what to do with. One sergeant described how the officers bought jewelry: “The watchmakers and jewelers saw their shops emptied in twenty-four hours, and everyone strutted around with two watches decorated with chains and ornaments that fell halfway down their thighs, just as the fashion was in Paris at that time.”
An inventory taken in December 1796, the first full month Dumas was on duty with the Army of Italy, put the official estimate of cash collected to that point at 45,706,493 francs and the amount collected in gold, silver, and precious jewels at 12,132,909 francs. Liberated Italians were beginning to wonder whether French freedom was worth the heavy price.
Throughout his time with the Army of Italy, Dumas clashed with Napoleon on the issue of how to treat civilians. As in the Vendée, Mr. Humanity found himself again in the role of trying to keep his troops from exploiting the local population in the permissive atmosphere of war. He wrote countless letters of reprimand to his cavalry officers for infractions such as “constantly going to the inns, eating and drinking without paying.” He ordered that a certain officer be relieved of command and placed under arrest for being “unworthy to be called a Frenchman” because he confiscated cattle supposedly under Dumas’s authority. At the bottom of the arrest order Dumas added:
P.S. You will also warn the hussars of that detachment that all the requisitions that they had the impudence to make in my name are void, and that all the cattle which have been taken must be returned immediately to their owners.… —Alex Dumas
Where most other generals were coarsened by their time in the Vendée, Dumas seems to have been made even more sensitive to the need for maintaining correct relations between troops and the civilian population. He treated the occupied population the way he insisted his own soldiers be treated: as deserving of his respect and—at least when they were not actively fighting him—protection.
When Napoleon ordered the evacuation of the civilians in a battle zone Dumas controlled, Mr. Humanity bristled at the order to confiscate all of their property that could be useful to the French forces. He was careful not to directly contravene one of Napoleon’s orders, but his conduct amounted to a conscientious objection to the policy of plunder. He wrote to his brigadier to “soften the order” and to make sure people were not abused or cheated by the troops:
You will appoint two officers or more, clever and worthy of your trust, to conduct an inventory of grains, hay, straw, oats, carriages, horses and oxen, and [you will] leave the inhabitants enough to feed themselves and their cattle.…
When we need to make use of carriages, they will be driven by the inhabitants to whom they belong, but always escorted by the number of necessary soldiers who will make sure that the drivers are never separated from their carriages, [since] once we don’t need them anymore, they will be driven back to where they were taken from, by the same escort.
You will give the strictest orders [to ensure] that the houses these inhabitants will leave are subject to no misappropriations by the soldiers, by prescribing that whosoever be caught committing one, will be punished to the extent of the laws. In the same way, you will have [your troops] make sure that the inhabitants leave their homes in the greatest safety.…
Alex Dumas
Receiving orders that all women must leave a certain brigade within twenty-four hours, presumably to forestall rape and prostitution, Dumas does not object to the order but speaks to headquarters on the women’s behalf: “Where will these women who are three hundred leagues from their home go? The law commands, but humanity demands. I enlist you, therefore, to postpone the execution of this order until General Masséna has proposed a gentler method.”
Dumas attempted to avoid clashing with the commander-in-chief directly by adopting the time-honored strategy of pretending that the man on top must be shocked at any abuses, which surely happened without his knowledge. While complaining about the plunder of his men, he attributes some of their behavior to the greed of their officers.
General-in-Chief Bonaparte:
Daily, General, I receive complaints from inhabitants who are forced to contribute to our soldiers because of the carelessness of our military commissaries and our administrators, who reduce [our men] to going without the most basic necessities.… Obliged to resist the ravages of the weather, to which he is exposed for lack of shoes, of clothing, he must also battle with hunger and the deprivation of the other things in life, because a Commissary, a quartermaster, have preferred their pleasures, their own affairs instead of providing for his subsistence. Thus I am pained, General, to see him [this soldier] indulging in excesses unworthy of a Republican, and that because he has been two or three days without meat and without bread.…
Alex Dumas
After all, Dumas reasoned, the French could not claim to be liberating the Italians if they were at the same time pillaging their property and abusing their women. And indeed, as the campaign wore on, the policy of systematic pillage would undermine the initial widespread goodwill the Italian patriots felt for the French.
Dumas had been a general of division when Napoleon was still a captain, and he had continued to outrank the Corsican until December 1795. But the man still known as General Bonaparte was convinced he was destined to rise above his contemporaries to be much more than a general. To Dumas, the Republic’s generals stood together on the same plane and should be proud of the fact. Along with liberty, the Revolution’s two other commandments were equality and brotherhood. “The French Revolution stamped a peculiar seal upon our army,” Dumas’s son the novelist later wrote:
When I come across it I treasure the imprint as one would that of a precious medal that will soon be lost to rust, whose worth one wishes to impress upon one’s contemporaries, its characteristics upon posterity.… We shall misjudge all these men of the Republic if we judge them only by those who survived and whom we knew under the Empire. The Empire was an era of powerful pressures, and the Emperor Napoleon was a brutal coiner of metal. All money had to be stamped with his image, and all bronze smelted in his furnace.
The campaign for Italy was the beginning of Napoleon’s reminting the republican generals in his own image. General Alex Dumas refused the new stamp. From the beginning of their relationship, Dumas failed to recognize the special reverence in which Napoleon expected to be held. While this must have piqued Napoleon, he was enough of a pragmatist to keep an eye on General Dumas to see what he could contribute. As he would discover in the conquest of Italy, Dumas could contribute quite a lot, so Napoleon would tolerate his troublesome manner and annoying egalitarian values—up to a point.
THE Austrian Empire’s main line of defense in northern Italy was a chain of fortresses built along the ancient trade routes running up into the Tyrol region and across the Alps at the Brenner Pass. Since Roman times, this has been the main non-sea route connecting
the Italian peninsula to the rest of Europe. Most of the route is densely wooded hilly terrain that, just south of the romantic city of Verona, opens up into the flat marshy plain surrounding the southernmost link in the fortress chain: Mantua.
By controlling Mantua, which stands almost in the center of northern Italy, guarding not only the route up to the Alps but also the crucial east-west axis linking the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, the Austrians effectively controlled northern Italy. They fortified and garrisoned Mantua, and after Napoleon’s victories against them, thousands more Austrian troops retreated into its fortress. The city was admirably protected by geography: by lakes on three sides and an impenetrable marsh on the fourth, southern side. The marsh, almost a swamp, produced one of the unhealthiest climates in northern Italy—flat, stale, and, at that time, miserably malarial—and it made direct assault on the fortress, which was reachable only by long causeway bridges, almost impossible. Napoleon instead decided to lay siege to it, counting on starving into submission the twenty-three thousand Austrian soldiers inside.
Six weeks after arriving in Milan to report to the Army of Italy, Alex Dumas was assigned to command the first division maintaining the siege at Mantua. Dumas’s two immediate predecessors in this post had resigned for medical reasons, overcome by the unhealthy climate; when Dumas arrived, his senior commander was ill.
Perhaps because he had grown up in a tropical climate, Dumas was not affected by the swamp air—and he was determined to come up with a way to break the Austrian grip on the city. He reviewed all aspects of the siege, inspecting the guard posts and gun emplacements, and interviewed all the officers under his command. He increased the number of patrols, especially at night.
Less than a week later, Dumas’s strategy bore fruit.
On Christmas Eve, his patrols arrested three men trying to cross through the French lines to enter the city. When they were brought to him in the middle of the night, he was particularly interested in one of them. The man’s bearing seemed to betray both intelligence and the fact that he was hiding something. Dumas suspected he might be in charge of a mission of some kind. He pressed the man, telling him that he knew he was on a mission to the Austrians and must have some sort of papers on him.
The man protested his innocence, claiming he was the son of a Veronese lawyer and had merely gotten into the wrong place at the wrong time. When nothing was found in his clothes or his books, Dumas accused him of having swallowed a message. At this point, he decided to frighten the man into a confession. Dumas’s son wrote a memorable account of the incident (based on Dermoncourt’s recollections) that accords with the official version:
Among my father’s favorite books were Caesar’s Commentaries. A volume of the Commentaries of the conqueror of Gaul lay open on the table placed near his bed, and the passage my father had been rereading before going to sleep was where Caesar relates that in order to get his lieutenant through to Labienus with valuable information, he had encased his letter in a little ivory ball about the size of a child’s toy; the messenger, when he came to the enemy’s posts, or to any place where he feared attack, was to carry the ball in his mouth, and to swallow it if he had a close call.
This passage from Caesar came back to him as a beam of light.
“Very well,” said my father; “since this man denies it, he must be taken out and shot.”
“What! General!” [he] exclaimed in terror. “Why am I to be shot?”
“To cut open your stomach and find the dispatches you have swallowed,” said my father with as much aplomb as if the thing had been revealed by some familiar spirit.
After the man confessed that he was a spy and that he did swallow the dispatches, it became a matter of how to get them out of him, short of disemboweling him. In the novelist’s account, Dumas dispatched Dermoncourt to find a pharmacist and have him prepare a purgative. When he returned, they gave the purgative to the spy; “then they took him to Dermoncourt’s room, where two soldiers kept him in sight, while Dermoncourt passed a very bad night, woken by the soldiers each time the spy put his hand anywhere near the button of his underclothes. Finally, around three in the morning, he delivered up a little ball of wax the size of a filbert.”
General Dumas’s letter to Napoleon the next day (Christmas, 1796) tells essentially the same story in a deadpan style. Dumas told the man, “if he did not want to be shot on the spot, to have me warned every time he needed to relieve himself.” And he concludes:
He did not fool me, he abided by my orders. Several times he asked for me, and several times I went through futile steps, until at last today he gave birth to the letter that I am having one of my aides-de-camp deliver specially to you.
There were in fact two letters inside the wax tablet, written on vellum.
One was from the Austrian emperor: the emperor told the general inside the fortress that “his valor and his zeal make me expect him to defend Mantua to the last extremity”; but, if the relieving army came too late and the men inside Mantua fortress started dying en masse from starvation and lack of supplies, they were to destroy everything in the city that could be used by the French—especially the fortress’s cannon—and then break out of siege over the marshland to the south to head toward the Papal States, where he and his men would find sanctuary. This was an interesting piece of information, because the French had always assumed that, were the Austrians to evacuate the fortress, they would head back north, toward their homeland. That the pope was offering the Austrians sanctuary was actionable news for the Army of Italy, for Napoleon had been looking for a reason to attack the Vatican.
General Dumas and his officers had been concerned, wrote the novelist, that “the dispatch might be in German, and no one in the area spoke German.… Great was the joy of the two officers when they saw that the letter had been written in French; it might have been said that the emperor and his commander-in-chief had foreseen the chance of the letter falling into my father’s hands.”
The other letter was from the Austrian general who was leading a twenty-eight-thousand-man army down to relieve the fortress. It explained that he would be coming down from the Tyrol but did not know exactly when his army could arrive.
Napoleon sent Dumas congratulations and sent a favorable note about the counterintelligence coup to the government in Paris. He then assigned Dumas command of a division at the fortified camp of San Antonio—Saint-Antoine, as the French called it—a village which guarded the approaches to Mantua from the north, the direction of the Alps.
THE siege wore on—a dull, nerve-racking affair, made worse by freezing rain, the constant lack of supplies, among the besiegers as well as the besieged, and mysterious, oddly spaced cannon fire that Dumas and his officers took for some sort of enemy signaling. In fact, they learned, it was only the “Venetian scoundrels”—officially neutral in the conflict—firing their weapons in celebration of the New Year. The French troops could barely sleep through the racket.
There were constant rumors of Austrian breakouts. Dumas often stayed out all night on horseback circling the perimeter, either alone or at the head of a few horsemen, looking for signs that the Austrians were on the move. In addition to all the fretting about when a breakout might happen, the dozens of letters Dumas wrote and received daily dealt with all the usual issues of functioning in a camp of some thousands of armed men. He requested thousands of soup rations and extra clothing, and suggested ways they could use the local river system to transport flour for making baguettes.
Finding that thousands of pairs of shoes were missing, Dumas became convinced that the commissaries, who were civilian contractors, were selling his troops’ supplies for profit. He wrote this letter to one he suspected in particular:
Citizen:
For a long time now, the troops want for rice, salt and many essential items; I would have thought that the first warnings I already gave you would have sufficed to compel you to employ any means necessary to put an end to this penury. I warn you that I am beginning to
tire of such carelessness, and if you do not hasten to pull yourself out of it, I’ll know what needs be done.
Alex Dumas
Wading through hundreds of pages of correspondence on such matters—the eighteenth-century version of office e-mail but elaborately penned and watermarked—I imagined what a hard-charging warrior like Dumas must have felt like, sitting around using only his quill for twelve hours a day. Sometimes he and his immediate superior, General Serurier, would produce an entire correspondence on something like a gun emplacement, or even horse feed—all dated the same day, the messenger having ridden from the south of the city to the north and back as the generals debated the details. The monotony of the correspondence evoked the monotony of the siege, in the chilly, fetid air of the Mantua swamps, waiting for something to break.*
On January 13, 1797, word came that the new Austrian divisions—the ones referred to in the wax-tablet messages—had been spotted north of Verona. These were 43,000 crack troops, heading straight for a French force of 10,300 men, which had retreated to Rivoli after early skirmishing. Napoleon sent in reinforcements, but the French were still outnumbered and outgunned.