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

by Tom Reiss

  The first letter I found was from General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, who in 1799, having suffered a humiliating defeat by the Austrians, temporarily retired from the army to political life, where he continued to wield considerable influence. Jourdan had served with Dumas in the Army of the North in 1794, and again in the Army of the Rhine in 1795. On July 25, he wrote to the new minister of war, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte:

  Citizeness Dumas, the wife of Citizen General Dumas, is worried about the fate of her husband, who was stationed with Citizen General Bonaparte in Egypt, and whom she has heard was obliged to embark back to France.… She has heard trustworthy opinions that he was taken prisoner in the Gulf of Taranto and taken to Messina during the month of Germinal. If you have any certain information of his whereabouts, you would please me greatly by passing it on to me.

  Kindly make inquiries.

  In addition to the appeal through Jourdan, Marie-Louise herself wrote to various figures at the Ministry of War multiple times, including this letter to Minister Bernadotte, sent three weeks later:

  Villers-Cotterêts, 24 Thermidor, Year VII [August 11, 1799]

  Of the French Republic, one and indivisible

  The Citizeness Dumas

  To the General Bernadotte, Minister of War:

  I had the honor, Citizen Minister, of writing you on the 4th of this month, but having not received your response, I feared my letter may not have reached you. I plead with you, sacrifice a moment of your time to give me information on what has become of my husband.

  On 26 Germinal [April 15], I received from him a letter dated the 11th Ventôse [March 1] in which he announced to me that since his health had deteriorated he was coming back to France to recuperate. He left from Alexandria between the 11th and the 17th of Ventôse [March 7] on the ship called the Belle Maltaise.… From that time on, I have received no news from him and various reports leave me in no doubt that he has been taken prisoner. Everything seems to indicate that he was taken in the Gulf of Taranto and from there conducted to Messina.

  I pray you, citizen minister, tell me what you might have heard.… The interest that you take in your brothers in arms gives me confidence in the interest you take in my husband. His gratitude as well as mine will equal the important service I await from you.

  Salute and respect,

  Wife Dumas

  Bernadotte was a republican general like her husband and Marie-Louise had reason to think he would help her. But as minister of war, Bernadotte had other things to worry about.

  In the summer of 1799, France, its allies, and its satellites were under siege by a new coalition of powers bent on reversing all the gains of seven years of hard-fought revolutionary war: England, Russia, Austria, Portugal, Turkey, and Naples. After sinking the French fleet the summer before at Aboukir Bay, the British—with the help of the Turks—had pinned down the leading divisions of the French army in the Middle East.

  Now, in the heartland of the pan-European republican revolution, France’s “sister republics” in Italy were falling like dominoes. The debacle in Naples had been followed by routs in the north, where the Austrians and the Russians, bankrolled by British gold, attacked the French everywhere. The republics that Dumas and his comrades had fought for over a year to create fell in a matter of weeks. The Cisalpine Republic was toppled in April 1799, and at the end of that month, the Austrians occupied Milan. The Italian patriots proved unable to defend themselves and, as often as not, hampered their own defense because they chafed under French occupation, finding it unworthy of their new revolutionary ideals. Bloody massacres of French-friendly patriots took place in Verona and other northern Italian cities, especially in Tuscany, where republican symbols were smashed and the trees of liberty were used to string up Giacobini. In Siena the counterrevolutionaries massacred the Jews and, everywhere, they reestablished the Jewish ghettos—whose dismantling they had seen as a key symbol of French liberal perdition. Most often, however, pro-French northern Italy collapsed as a result of Austrian—and now also Russian—invasion. The old powers of Europe were on the march again.

  With a significant element of the French military still in the Middle East, it took the Austrians only three weeks to recapture the fortress city that had taken Dumas and his comrades nine months of siege fighting to secure: the French surrendered Mantua on July 28. After the battle the Austrians took the entire French general staff in the region hostage. It was a total reversal of the glorious campaign of 1797. Dumas’s former commander and comrade General Joubert was appointed general-in-chief of the French Army of Italy, but he was killed at his first engagement, the Battle of Novi, on August 15. The Republic of Rome fell on September 30.

  The nation that had so recently spread its revolution to all the corners of Europe stood, once again, on the verge of invasion and defeat. It was hardly surprising, then, that General Bernadotte, at the helm of the French War Ministry, could not offer much help to Marie-Louise. He replied, in the last week of August, that the ministry could regrettably provide no “satisfying information on the situation of General Dumas,” but that “if I receive any word of him, rest assured I will notify you as soon as I can.”

  FAILING to get help from the army, Marie-Louise began a letter-writing campaign to influential members of the government. On October 1, she wrote to Paul Barras, the chief political Director and Napoleon’s old patron, beseeching him to take an interest in her husband’s case. But Barras, who had no time for anything that did not line his pockets, was disinclined to help. He did not much care about republican generals or their fate. Earlier that year he had been engaged in betraying the Republic—helping agents of Louis XVIII, the murdered king’s brother, in a conspiracy to get Louis on the throne, help for which Barras was offered twelve million francs.

  With the war going badly, the government lost the support of even the corrupt men who ran it. France was again on the verge of economic and social collapse, as factions took to the streets in all parts of the country. Small vagrant armies pillaged and looted in the countryside. Financial mismanagement and military disasters had left Paris unable to sustain law and order, not to mention necessities like hospitals and schools. The men in power were looking for a way out. And in early October, a way out arrived.

  When General Bonaparte landed back in France, on October 9, the conqueror of Egypt was just the strongman the government needed. Though Napoleon had left bloody hell behind him, the most recent news that had reached France was of his victory against the Turks at the Battle of Aboukir ten weeks before. Despite its short distance from France, Egypt was on another continent—made more distant by the British naval blockade—and there were few sources of reliable news from there that were not controlled by Napoleon himself. When his ship arrived, the standard quarantine was set up to ensure that neither Napoleon nor his staff were infected with plague, which was known to be devastating the troops who had stayed behind. But the quarantine could not restrain the exuberant crowds who rushed onto his ship crying, “Better the plague than the Austrians!”

  Napoleon made a triumphant trip from his port of landing to Paris, where Bishop Talleyrand, always choreographing the show behind the show, arranged meetings between Napoleon and members of the Directory. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte, had managed to get himself elected to the Council of Five Hundred—and was even made its president. The maneuver required Lucien to lie about his age—he was only twenty-four, when the official minimum age was thirty—but this paled in comparison with his larger deviousness: he was getting himself elected president of the country’s main legislative body and at the same time he was about to help his big brother stage a coup d’état to eliminate it.

  The details of the conspiracy were worked out over after-dinner drinks at Lucien Bonaparte’s house on November 1. The philosopher Volney, who had done so much to inspire the Egyptian expedition, also appeared as a co-conspirator, as did Napoleon’s banker, Collot, who put up the money.

  MARIE-LOUISE continued w
riting to everyone she could think of to beg for help in finding her husband. At last, on October 29, she received the first confirmation that Alex was still alive, in a letter from a top government figure:

  I received, Citizeness, your two letters in which you describe your concern for your husband’s fate. Believe me when I say I very much share this concern. We have left no stone unturned to discover where he is detained, but we do not [yet] know for sure; however, all reports lead us to believe that he is in Naples or in Sicily. You can rest assured he is alive—none of the information we received about him leaves us in any doubt of this. You can also believe that we will use the most suitable means to assuage your concern that he be exchanged. I pray you to rest assured that I will take the greatest care to inform you as soon as I have more news.

  Salute and fraternity,

  Moulin

  Marie-Louise was lucky to get this news, as Moulin (and the rest of the government) would be deposed eleven days later.

  That same week she received further details, from the minister of the navy and the colonies, who told her that he had corresponded about General Dumas with the French consul general in Genoa, capital of the recently created Republic of Liguria.† The consul had confirmed that her husband had been “taken prisoner of war by the Neapolitans,” and the minister was opening up channels with Spain in order to get Dumas further news from his family. The minister promised “to call on the Spanish government to free your husband.” (The reason for pressing Spain rather than the Kingdom of Naples directly was that the Kingdom of Naples had no diplomatic relations with France at this point.) “I hope, Citizeness, that this step will meet with some success,” the minister concluded. But events later that week would distract everyone from all such business.

  On November 9, 1799, Police Minister Joseph Fouché’s men posted a proclamation from Napoleon on walls throughout Paris: “Under the present special circumstances, the Council of Five Hundred needs the unanimous support and trust of all patriots. Rally round it, that is the way to place the republic on a foundation of civil liberty, domestic happiness, victory, and peace.” The members of the Five Hundred were woken up early the next morning, at their homes, and told that a plot was under way against the Republic and that they needed to assemble immediately in a special session; they were warned not to meet in Paris but to take immediate measures to move out of the city to a safe place. This place was the old Palace of Saint-Cloud, six miles outside the capital, where the members could be better “protected.”

  On the cold, gray Sunday of November 10, at dawn, Napoleon ordered five thousand troops to surround the Palace of Saint-Cloud Orangerie, where the Five Hundred had gathered. At first, things did not go smoothly. When Napoleon tried making an appearance in the Orangerie, the tricked legislators—all clad in their official uniforms of red togas, worn over their regular clothes, and tricolor scarves—began shouting. “Down with the dictator!” Napoleon, who had little experience of civilian politics and lost his cool, shouted back: “You are sitting on a volcano!” He found himself booed, showered with curses, and even spat on. “Down with the dictator! Down with the tyrant!” Someone grabbed Napoleon’s collar and shook him. The Council members called for a motion to “outlaw” General Bonaparte, which could have been tantamount to a death sentence.

  The day was saved for Napoleon by Lucien, the underage president of the Five Hundred. Seeing his fellow deputies turn violently against his brother, he turned the accusations of usurping democracy back on them: “There is no liberty left in here,” he cried, taking off the red toga he wore over his suit and placing it on the podium. “Your President, in a sign of public mourning, is abandoning the symbols of the popular magistracy.” With that, Lucien walked out of the hall and into the courtyard, along with his brother, where they both mounted horses. From horseback, Lucien delivered a speech to the troops in which he announced that “audacious brigands, who are doubtless inspired by the fatal genius of the English government, have risen in rebellion against the Council.” He called on the troops, in the name of his brother, to liberate the Council from these brigands and to expel them from the chamber—“so that, protected against daggers by bayonets, we might be able to deliberate on the fate of the Republic.”

  Napoleon attempted to clarify things for the soldiers in case his younger brother’s speech had been too subtle: “If anyone resists, kill, kill, kill! Follow me, I am the god of battles!” At this point Lucien supposedly told his brother, sotto voce, that he should hold his tongue because he was in Paris, not Egypt. “You’re not talking to your Mamelukes!” And then he performed his most flamboyant and effective gesture of the coup, grabbing Napoleon’s sword from its scabbard and pointing it at his brother’s chest. “I swear that I will stab my own brother in the heart if he ever attempts anything against the liberty of Frenchmen!” At this point, General Murat, who in Egypt had griped about Napoleon’s despotism with his comrade General Dumas, now did what needed to be done to inspire the cavalry to subvert the democratic order. He reared his horse and waved his saber and shouted “Vive le général! Vive le président!” and then he pointed at the doors of the Orangerie and shouted “Charge!” The invasion of the hall by armed cavalry made an impression on France’s legislators, who ran to the windows and began jumping out to escape.‡

  That night a group of allied deputies stayed up late with the plotters, working by candlelight, taking votes and drafting papers, to make it all legal. By 3 a.m. it was finished. France had a new government, with Napoleon appointed first consul at the head of a ruling body of three consuls. Naturally, the other two would do his bidding. “Consul” was an evocation of Rome, and everyone could see that, as in Rome, one Caesar had emerged supreme.

  The fate of everything and everyone in Europe would soon hang on the whim of this dictator in a tricolor sash. The decade of French republicanism and democracy—the age of seemingly infinite emancipation, with all its expansive horrors and hopes—was over.

  SIX days after the coup, Marie-Louise received a tortuously bureaucratic letter from her husband’s old comrade Murat, now a rising star in the new order:

  At the General Headquarters in Paris, on 25 Brumaire, Year VIII

  [November 16, 1799] of the French Republic, Cavalry Division

  Joachim Murat, General of Division

  To the Citizeness Dumas—Villers-Cotterêts

  Madame, to address the concerns contained in the letter that you did me the honor of sending me on the 15th of this month, I had Citizen Beaumont, my aide-de-camp, look into the information in which you were interested. It shows that according to the report issued by the Offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on 15 Fructidor [September 1], Citizen Berthelin, ambassador in Rome, wrote to Citizen Belleville, Consul General in Genoa, and gave him the responsibility of informing the ministers of Foreign Affairs and of the Navy that Generals Dumas and Manscourt were held prisoner in Taranto, having been held by Cardinal Ruffo in exchange for various Neapolitan demands. Citizen Belleville fulfilled his intentions, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thinking that your husband had been released, had not thought it necessary to take care of. Informed by me to the contrary, he is about to speak to the ministry of Spain and to the general-in-chief leading the Army of Italy so that they may call for his release. I am delighted, Madam, that this opportunity provides me with the advantage of assuring you that I am entirely devoted to you.

  Your fellow citizen

  J. Murat

  A few years later Napoleon would crown Murat the king of Naples, enthroning him along with his wife, Napoleon’s younger sister Caroline. Together, they would establish a hedonistic Napoleonic court in the very place that had caused his old friend Dumas so much misery.

  * It would not be until September 11, nearly six months after the event, that the Gazette Nationale du Moniteur published the following item: “General Dumas has been taken by the Neapolitans”—the only published notice I ever found of Dumas’s imprisonment.

  �
� After the reversals of the past months, the Ligurian Republic, a tiny strip along the coast, was the sole outpost of republican government left in Italy. Hence, it was the only place left in Italy that had a French consul.

  ‡ Among the officers leading the cavalry into the hall would likely have been the French army’s second-highest-ranking man of color after General Dumas: the Cuban-born former slave Joseph “Hercules” Dominguez, who had served Napoleon in Italy and Egypt.

  21

  THE DUNGEON

  DUMAS lay doubled up on the damp stones, the sounds of the sea and the guards’ shouting on the towers coming in through the high window. The wooden doors to the courtyard were not locked, but they were heavy, and he was in too much pain and too weak to reach them or to cry out. His servant eventually discovered him lying there in darkness, half delirious with pain and lying in a puddle of vomit. His white military breeches were soiled and a sheen of sweat covered his skin. The servant ran to find General Manscourt, who was soon at Dumas’s side. Manscourt then went to the governor of the fortress and begged him to bring a doctor urgently, saying he feared for Dumas’s life.

  While they waited for the doctor, Manscourt and the servant struggled to help Dumas. On his whispered instructions, the servant gave him some milk from a little goat that Dumas had brought with him from Egypt. At first he seemed to tolerate it fairly well, but he soon doubled over in even fiercer pain.

  When he recovered enough to sit up, the servant fed Dumas spoonfuls of olive oil mixed with lemon juice and gave him “over forty enemas in three hours,” both widely used remedies for parasitic worms in the eighteenth century that Dumas would later credit with saving his life.*

  All the while, they waited for the doctor who had supposedly been summoned. Hours passed. The governor eventually informed them “with indifference” that the doctor was in the countryside and would not be back for some time.