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

by Tom Reiss

  There were many things wrong with the French Republic at the time of Napoleon’s coup, but there was one thing most modern people would see as marvelously right: it offered basic rights and opportunities to people regardless of the color of their skin. For all their faults, the revolutionary French governmental bodies—the legislatures in Paris with their ever-changing names—admitted black and mixed-race representatives among their members as equals. Although the French still referred to black and mixed-race men in their country as “Americans,” the American Congress at that time would rarely admit a black person into its presence except to serve refreshments or sweep the floor.

  Much support for Napoleon’s coup had come from a coalition of slavers and exiled plantation owners, who calculated that a dictator in tricolor trimmings would mean a better chance for reestablishing slavery than any sort of actual representative government—especially one that included blacks, abolitionists, and assorted revolutionary idealists. Napoleon visited Normandy and was fêted at a banquet by Charles de la Pailleterie’s old rivals in the slaving business, Constantin and Stanislas Foäche, who hoped a new era of slave-driven profits was just around the corner.

  These businessmen argued that, in a world where its global competitors still practiced slavery, France could not afford to continue with its bizarre policy of emancipation and equal rights. Revolutionary ideas simply cost too much. The exports of Saint-Domingue in the years 1799–1800 were less than a quarter of what they had been in 1788–89. Even General Toussaint Louverture—the French Revolution’s standard-bearer among Saint-Domingue’s blacks and a brilliant leader of men—struggled to get fieldworkers to go back to the plantations. Thousands of these former slaves had served as soldiers of the Revolution and had no desire to return to hacking cane.

  Days after his coup, Napoleon received a proposal for lifting the French ban on the slave trade. It was too early for such bold action, but he did begin repaying his political debt to the pro-slavery lobby, which had lent him important support. He replaced the minister of the navy and colonies, a member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, and seeded pro-slavery figures throughout the government. The Constitution of Revolutionary Year VIII that Napoleon proclaimed in December 1799, a month after seizing power, was vague on the race issue but contained an ominous line for all people of color: “The regime of the French colonies is to be determined by special laws.”

  But Napoleon played a double game. On Christmas Day, 1799, shortly after issuing the new constitution, he made a proclamation to the people of Saint-Domingue: “Remember, brave Negroes, that the French people alone recognize your liberty and your equal rights.” Five days later he made a secret decision to begin building a new armada, which would ferry forty thousand French troops across the Atlantic to the Americas. It would ultimately grow even larger than the one he had taken to Egypt. Its goal: the reconquest of France’s most profitable colony. Barely a month in power, Napoleon was planning a full-scale military invasion of Saint-Domingue.

  There could be no misinterpreting the racial component of such an invasion: Saint-Domingue was not some foreign country. It had a French administration and had still considered itself part of the French Republic throughout the years since emancipation. Moreover, the educated black and mixed-race citizens of Saint-Domingue were devoted to French thought and politics, while the island’s white Creoles were quite ready and even eager to go over to the English or the Spanish in exchange for maintaining slavery. (Napoleon wrote to a Martinique planter to express sympathy for the man’s decision to defect to the English rather than lose his slaves.) No large invasion of Saint-Domingue would make sense unless it was part of a strategy to turn back the clock and reimpose white rule of the island. But Napoleon had to wait until he had a peace treaty with England, so the fleet would not be intercepted on its way across the Atlantic. For the time being, he would pretend to be a friend to the blacks and a republican defender of their universal human rights.

  GENERAL Toussaint Louverture, a skilled diplomat as well as a military tactician, also kept his cards close to his vest. He played the British and Spanish off against the French, as he had for much of the past decade, and cut deals with whoever he thought might increase his own and his island’s power. Unlike many other black revolutionaries, he was a pragmatist and a long-term thinker, determined to bring prosperity back to Saint-Domingue and even to reintegrate white plantation owners, if necessary. There was only one red line that could not be crossed: slavery must never return.

  General Louverture had two sons who were living in Paris. Isaac Louverture was studying full-time, while his half brother, Placide, was serving as an aide-de-camp to a French general. At the beginning of 1802 these two distinguished young men of color were still living an existence that, while unheard-of in any other country, was not only possible but was almost normal in France. They were nervous, however, about certain changes in the city, and about rumors of a “formidable expedition” the government was preparing to send to their homeland. They had heard warships were massing at many of France’s Atlantic ports—Brest, Lorient, Rochefort, and Toulon.

  One day the headmaster of Isaac Louverture’s college was surprised by an order to appear before Minister Denis Decrès at the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. Knowing that Decrès hated people of color and was opposed to mixed-race education, the headmaster must have feared a diatribe or a fine, or worse. Instead, Minister Decrès “invited” the headmaster to accompany the sons of Toussaint Louverture back with the French armada to Saint-Domingue. Though this might have been interpreted as a deportation order, Minister Decrès played his part well, since the headmaster returned to his college where, as Isaac later remembered in his memoir, he “announced the news to his young scholars, and embraced them, saying with tears in his eyes that the French government was motivated only by peaceful considerations.” A few days later he sent the headmaster a letter saying that the first consul himself wished to see the Louverture brothers before their departure. Decrès arrived at the college personally to escort the boys to the Tuileries Palace to meet Napoleon, who gave them a hearty welcome.

  “Your father is a great man,” said Napoleon, addressing Isaac Louverture:

  He has rendered eminent service to France. You will say to him that as the first [consul] of the French people, I promise him protection, glory, and honor. Do not believe that it is the intention of France to carry war into Saint-Domingue. The army sent by France is not destined to combat the troops of the country, but to augment their force. Here is General Leclerc, my brother-in-law, whom I have named captain-general, and who will command this army. Orders have been given that you may be fifteen days in advance at Saint-Domingue, to the end that you may announce the coming of the expedition to your father.

  Napoleon also quizzed Isaac on mathematics and acted pleased with his answers. Before their departure Minister Decrès presented both young men with a suit of dazzling armor, manufactured at Versailles, and “a rich and brilliant officer’s costume, in the name of the government of France.”

  The sons soon determined that they were being used against their father—the trip across the Atlantic with Napoleon’s brother-in-law General Leclerc and forty thousand French soldiers left little doubt in their minds—and by the time they reached Saint-Domingue they were more or less officially acknowledged to be hostages. Still, once the fighting began, their father would repel the French invasion forces for four months before agreeing, after an even more venal deception on the part of the French command, to come to an informal diplomatic meeting. On the way, Napoleon’s soldiers ambushed the black republican hero of Saint-Domingue and sent Toussaint back to France in chains. This man of the tropics was thrown into a freezing cold cell with dripping wet walls and a fire that, on orders from Napoleon, was inadequately fed with wood. “His iron frame, which had withstood the privations and fatigues of ten incredible years, now huddled before the logs measured out by the orders of Bonaparte,” wrote C. L. R. James. “T
he hitherto unsleeping intellect collapsed periodically into long hours of coma. Before the spring he was dying. One April morning he was found dead in his chair.”

  Toussaint’s capture did not stop the resistance. By August, a despairing General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon: “It is not enough to have removed Toussaint. Here there are two thousand leaders to arrest. If I take the weapons the taste for insurrection still dominates. I have captured 20,000 guns but there are at least as many still in the hands of the freedmen.”

  Napoleon gave Leclerc strict orders that no officers of color over the rank of captain could be left alive in Saint-Domingue—they were all to be either killed, or captured and deported back to France. Rekindling the cruelest traditions of Ancien Régime slavery in the sugar islands, French soldiers tortured, raped, and murdered blacks in every gruesome way imaginable. Most of the more than three thousand soldiers of color deported at gunpoint were illegally sold into slavery elsewhere in the Caribbean by corrupt naval commanders.

  By 1804, Haitians had succeeded in creating a new nation and identity. More than forty thousand French soldiers died in the futile operations—half the number sent—and many times that number of blacks and mulattos, both military and civilian, perished. Evoking a particularly chilling image in light of twentieth-century mass murders, some blacks were killed by deliberate asphyxiation using burning sulfur in enclosed spaces aboard French vessels in Port-au-Prince harbor. Black fighters were equally vicious in their treatment of the local white population, but they also welcomed some whites (such as units of Polish soldiers who had arrived with the French but switched sides).

  In the summer of 1802 French forces also invaded Guadeloupe, the other French sugar island where the emancipation had applied, and rampaged through the colony, seizing any uniformed blacks they came across and either killing them or throwing them in irons. Cornered at a plantation on the slope of La Soufrière volcano, some three hundred of the island’s leading black and mulatto rebels—men and women—chose to take their own lives rather than live to see slavery return. Screaming “Live free or die!” they blew themselves up with their remaining gunpowder. Their leader was Louis Delgrès, a colonel who had served in the Black Legion in 1792 under Dumas’s command.

  DURING the 1790s, the National Colonial Institute in Paris had taken the revolutionary step of educating black, mixed-race, and white children together. Now Napoleon’s government cut the Institute’s funding and ended its experiment in color-blind education.

  One of its students, Louis-Blaise Lechat, the son of a black French officer from Saint-Domingue, remembered an official school visit in 1801 by the same minister of the navy and colonies who “invited” Isaac and Placide Louverture to return to Saint-Domingue. Lechat described the visit in a letter to Isaac and Placide some years later: “Minister Decrès came to the Institute, assembled all of the Americans [i.e. the blacks] into the courtyard, and gave them a very harsh speech. The government would no longer pay for their education: They had already done too much for the likes of us.”

  As the school’s reputation quickly plummeted, the paying students abandoned it, and by 1802 there were only about two dozen pupils on public scholarship attending: of these, nine were black, six mixed-race, and seven white. At the end of the year, the school abruptly closed its doors. Many students of color were sent to orphanages, while the older ones, though only in their teens, were put into military service as errand boys.

  Ten-year-old Ferdinand Christophe, the son of Henri Christophe, one of Saint-Domingue’s top black generals—and the future King Henri I of Haiti—had the misfortune to arrive at the Institution’s gates in 1802, just as it was being dismantled. Taken by the authorities, he was put into an orphanage called La Pitié (“The Merciful”), and the “small fortune” in jewels and gold that he carried to support his education was stolen. The last anyone saw of him, the young man had been turned into a kind of security guard for the orphanage. A woman in 1814 recalled the following incident, witnessed ten years earlier, to a memoirist:

  [She] saw a young man standing guard at the gate of La Pitié. Because Mlle Marie had told them about Christophe’s son, they went over to him, crying out, “Here is the son of Christophe.” The young man joyfully said, “Yes it’s me.” But in the same moment a man who was at the gate of La Pitié gave Christophe two powerful blows that made Christophe drop his rifle and fall over, after which it was necessary for him to retreat inside. It was impossible to catch a glimpse of him from this time forward, but it is known that they sent him to learn the trade of shoemaking, requiring him to take it up. Christophe continually refused, saying that his father had sent him to France to get a fine education, not to be a cobbler.

  Ferdinand Christophe continued to refuse to take up the manual trade the government had chosen for him. In 1805 he was found dead at the orphanage. He was twelve years old.

  ONE of the institutions Napoleon is best remembered for is the Legion of Honor, the first “order of merit” that really deserved the name. Though it took its cues from the monarchic tradition of knighting individuals as a reward for outstanding service, the Legion was genuinely open to men of all professions and backgrounds. It was proclaimed law on May 19, 1802, and even today it remains indelibly associated with the best legacy of Napoleonic France.

  General Dumas’s son would later lament that his father died “without even having been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor—he who had been the hero of the day at Maulde … at Mont Cenis, at the Siege of Mantua, at the bridge of Brixen, at the revolt of Cairo, the man whom Bonaparte had made governor of Treviso and whom he presented to the Directory as the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol.” (Indeed, I would find a letter to General Dumas from Murat indicating that he would “pass on with pleasure” General Dumas’s own request to be admitted to the Legion.)

  But there was an obvious reason Dumas could not have been admitted, even if Napoleon had not personally detested him. On May 20, 1802, the day after creating the Legion of Honor, Napoleon issued another proclamation, one that revealed his true position on slavery in the French Empire. Colonies where the 1794 abolition hadn’t gone into effect—those, like Martinique, which the British had seized during the revolutionary wars and only recently returned to France—were to officially remain in a state of pre-1789 slavery. Though Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe weren’t explicitly affected, the proclamation included a clause stating that for ten years, “in spite of all previous laws,” all colonies would be subject to new regulations imposed by the central government. The door to the complete reimposition of slavery had been opened. This infamous clause was followed by a series of now forgotten laws that crushed the rights the Revolution had given to men of color within France.

  Two weeks after the slavery decree, Napoleon issued a law banning all officers and soldiers of color who had retired or been discharged from the army from living in Paris and the surrounding area. In July, a new order revived the old royal Police des Noirs laws, except now they forbade “blacks, mulattos, and men of color … from entering the continental territory of the Republic under any cause or pretext, unless supplied with special authorization.” And this time the racist laws would be enforced, not merely proclaimed. All those in noncompliance would be held until deported. In such circumstances, the Legion of Honor was a pipe dream.

  The following year, Napoleon outlawed marriages between people of different skin colors. The minister of justice wrote to all prefects that it was “the intention of the government that no act of marriage between whites and blacks will be accepted” and that it was their duty to enforce the law. When a mulatto servant in Napoleon’s own household wished to marry a white man, Josephine had to personally intercede with her husband for an exception to the no-mixed-marriages law.

  Dumas had been released from the fortress dungeon only to find his world transformed into one. Surreal degradations now menaced him in his own country, as the government methodically restricted, rolled back, and finally eliminated rights for French
citizens of color. Less than a year after arriving back in France, General Dumas would need to request a special dispensation to be allowed to stay in his own house in Villers-Cotterêts—part of the zone forbidden to retired military men of color.

  The war hero now had to appeal to his former army comrades to pull strings so he wouldn’t be deported.

  Once, when Dumas had felt slighted by the army’s failure to give him an important combat posting, he had written an angry letter to the minister of war stating that if he really merited such poor treatment, then he would prove to be “no longer worthy of the cause for which I have a dual interest because of the climate that saw my birth.” This was as close as Dumas ever came to invoking the deepest origins of his zeal in the service of the French Republic. He did not invoke such things now.

  IN reading through Dumas’s letters from these years at the archives in the Château de Vincennes, I came across another folder of letters written at the time, by members of the Black Pioneers—a battalion initially made up of some eight hundred prisoners of war from Saint-Domingue and Guadaloupe who had been deported to France and forced to serve in the same military that had invaded and routed their homeland. The side on which they had fought in the complex island conflicts often made little difference. Napoleon shipped them south to Italy, where for years they were given only hard manual labor to do. In French military parlance, “pioneers” signified companies of infantry troops who often did the army’s dirty prep work, building fortifications and digging trenches before the soldiers rushed in.